Modeling care processes in GZA hospital (Kick-off)

Friday the 30th of March I been to Antwerp together with Pieter Van Gorp to talk to H. Van Der Mussele and J. De Sitter. They are policy makers in the GasthuisZusters Antwerpen hospital (GZA) and are working on a new system. In this post I will tell you everything I’ve noticed and what I’ve learned. First I will inform you about the goal of the project form the university’s point of view and what is in it for the GZA. After that I will discuss the meeting on contents and my observations about the current way of working within the hospital and how they would like to work in the near future.

Methodology

As mentioned in one of the previous post I will split up the literature review in three parts. The first literature study will be about the various terms that are used to identify a clinical pathway. In this blog post I will mention the newest update after a meeting with my mentor and I will present you the method that I will use during this literature study. Also the research question for the time being is presented together with the involved supervisors for reviewing the literature review.

What is a care pathway?

After the previous post I have been thinking about the used search key to find some literature. I came to the conclusion that the term care pathway was not completely clear to me. There are some questions that I couldn’t answer. One of these questions was about the definitions of a care pathway. What is a care pathway? How is it defined? And after reading some article about care pathways, I came across some comparable definitions, and I asked myself: Is there a difference between the various definitions or are they all synonyms? So I have been investigating on this point and this is what I found so far.