Palliative care teams and management levers

This paper is the third in a series that will examine the management of innovation by multidisciplinary patient care teams in palliative care in Australia and reports on the existence and use of organisational levers to enable and influence required characteristic behaviours in the teams. These levers work in concert with organisational capabilities to resource the required behaviours. Interviews with management teams in three Australian palliative care case study organisations confirm the existence and use of organisational levers. It appears that levers are available organisationally and utilised where necessary but fall into three distinct groups, those utilised by any person or group needing them, those utilised more specifically by management teams and those utilised by multidisciplinary patient care teams. It is noted that these groups are dependent on the existence of the levers for the optimisation of their efforts.