Exploring sustainable innovation within public healthcare sector reform – the case of a public-private partnership

Current public policy reform promotes increased capacity for treatment of the chronic diseases underlining the need for a more sustainable and innovative healthcare system. In this paper we explore sustainable innovation in the health care sector through a public-private partnership. The purpose and mission of the partnership is to develop ’world class treatment’ of diabetes care through innovation. The partnership is based on a 10-year contract (2017-2027), funded by a major private foundation and rolled out in five regional centres integrated into public hospitals.
We conducted a longitudinal explorative case study based on qualitative data (interviews and key documents) from the five regional centres of the partnership.
The findings show that an expressed concern for sustainability of long-term organisational accountability and legitimacy was absent during the initiation phase from 2017-2020. However, as innovations faced implementation barriers – mainly financial barriers of limited resources in the public hospitals – the leaders of the centres reconfigured innovation to satisfy sustainability criteria, mainly financial and organizational feasibility. Later, in the aftermath of Covid-19 from 2021 onwards, dimensions of sustainability expanded to also include more conventional sustainability topics of the environment, such as climate change, and social inequality in healthcare. We map out how sustainability as governance approach evolved progressively during later phases of the centres to qualify innovation, and thereby the paper contributes to current public policy discussions on sustainable transformation of the healthcare sector.