Professional Divergence as an Alternative Type of Cross-boundary Governance Issue: A Preliminary Exploration Using the Ministry of Health and Welfare as an Example
I-Chun Liu, Don-Yun Chen, Chao-Yi Lin, I-Hua Lai *
Abstract
The Ministry of Health and Welfare was established on July 23, 2013 as part of the organizational reform of the Executive Yuan. The aim was to create an individual-centered health and welfare network to promote the health and well-being of the entire population. To achieve that end, the ministry expanded its staff’s core duties from hygiene and medical issues to the domain of social welfare services. The ministry’s work has both cross-boundary and cross-disciplinary characteristics. The integration of the health system and the social welfare system is one of the most frequently discussed themes among the various issues associated with the organizational reform of the Executive Yuan. Furthermore, research on the integration of the health system and social welfare services has resulted in the promotion of long-term care policies. Relevant studies suggest that after the establishment of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the minister should hold regular long-term care meetings, so that both professions can share a fixed channel of communication, thereby fostering mutual understanding and trust. In this aspect, this study differs from existing cross-departmental and cross-regional studies, as it focuses on cross-domain professional differences. Through literature reviews, questionnaire surveys, and in-depth interviews, this study was conducted from the perspective of internal dynamics of interests, in order to explore the characteristics of interactional and operating difficulties between the health system and the social welfare system under the organizational framework of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. We found that there were indeed interactional and operating difficulties between the two systems. Owing to the differences in the logic of the two professions, different cultures have formed. The findings of this study suggest that different occasions or issues should be employed to enable middle to senior personnel to understand and respect the diversification and heterogeneity of different professions, which will help to bolster the possibilities for cooperation across disciplines.
Keywords: across boundary governance, interprofession, core competence, competence
* I-Chun Liu, Professor, Department of Social and Policy Sciences, Yuan Ze University, e-mail: chun0820@saturn.yzu.edu.tw; Don-Yun Chen, Professor, Department of Public Administration, National Chengchi University, email: donc@nccu.edu.tw; Chao-Yi Lin, Associate Professor, Department of Social Work, National Taipei University, e-mail: cylin@mail.ntpu.edu.tw; I-Hua Lai, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Public Administration, National Chengchi University, e-mail: evalai920@gmail.com.