Complexity science: The challenge of complexity in health care

Using interactive workshops to prompt knowledge exchange: a realist evaluation of a knowledge to action initiative

“…Particular KE activities had been built into the programme (in line with the programme theories) to prompt and build upon the relational and softer discursive elements underpinning knowledge exchange. With research evidence providing few (if any) directly actionable messages (perhaps due to the complex nature of public health issues (35)(36)(37), the round-table discussions were designed to allow stakeholders to discuss issues in order to apply the evidence and tease out the implications for local practice (38). From observations, this appeared a step too far (or too difficult) to take.…”

Complexity Science to Conceptualize Health and Disease: Is It Relevant to Clinical Medicine?

“…Complexity science has several key concepts that distinguish it from the mechanistic approach: adaptation, lack of hierarchies, self-organization, and emergence. 10,11 Adaptation allows the system to modify its structures (ie, self-organization) and cope with forces or influences from the environment. Since these systems are not passive and adapt by a process of reorganization, they are known as complex adaptive systems (CASs) and defined as "a collection of individual agents with freedom to act in ways that are not always totally predictable, and whose actions are interconnected so that one agent's action changes the context for other agents."…”

“…Since these systems are not passive and adapt by a process of reorganization, they are known as complex adaptive systems (CASs) and defined as "a collection of individual agents with freedom to act in ways that are not always totally predictable, and whose actions are interconnected so that one agent's action changes the context for other agents." 10 As a result of the self-organization and adaptation, the system may yield novel properties (ie, emergence). A CAS also exhibits multiple levels of "heterarchical" interrelations, rather than a hierarchical mode of control, and demonstrates nonlinear relationships among the subsystems.…”

The single most important intervention to tackle obesity…

“…The concept of complexity in health care, and in public health, has been around for some years now (Plsek and Greenhalgh 2001), but remains on the margins of the majority of health and policy activity. This may be at least partly because of the inherent challenge of the perspective to a discipline grounded in biomedicine.…”