Understanding sustainability in healthcare systems: A systems thinking perspective

Healthcare systems are often confronted with problems of scarce resources and the ever-increasing demand. As a result, healthcare organizations always seek to ensure sustainable satisfaction of the society´s health status, the employee´s expectations, as well as the organizational objectives. While patient satisfaction is known to be a crucial factor in the social component of healthcare sustainability, employee satisfaction (job satisfaction), and organizational effectiveness (satisfaction) are important; fulfilment of the patient, the employee, and the management is essential. However, there are complex factors behind the three major players in the healthcare system. A balanced, holistic systems view is therefore necessary to ensure sustainable quality of life and business survivability and growth. By viewing the healthcare system as a system of systems, we propose a systems thinking approach to analyze individual and overall satisfaction, together with the pertinent factors and their relationships within the healthcare system. We suggest a set of satisfaction indices defined in terms of the perceived satisfaction of the three players in a complex healthcare system.