Guest editors
Professor Catherine Pope
Professor of Medical Sociology, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
catherine.pope@phc.ox.ac.uk
https://www.phc.ox.ac.uk/team/catherine-pope
Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite
Founding Director, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, and Director, Centre for Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science, Macquarie University, Australia
jeffrey.braithwaite@mq.edu.au
https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/jeffrey-braithwaite/
Introduction
Sustainable care is never guaranteed. It depends on the continuing work of people, teams, organisations, networks and systems to preserve what matters, adapt what no longer works and create new arrangements under changing conditions. Sustainability is therefore not a stable end-state or a technical property of an intervention. It is an organisational accomplishment: contested, relational, resource-dependent and continually at risk of erosion.
This special issue follows the 2026 Organisational Behaviour in Health Care (OBHC) Conference, hosted by Saïd Business School and the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford from 8–10 April 2026. The conference theme, “Organising Sustainable Health and Care”, brought together scholarship on sustaining change in complex care systems and on using people, technologies and other health resources responsibly. It also foregrounded environmental and social sustainability in the context of climate change and deep global interdependence.
The special issue extends that conversation. We seek theoretically ambitious and empirically grounded papers that explain how organisations and health systems respond to a polycrisis: how they are managed and governed, and how multiple, overlapping crises whose interactions produce pressures that cannot be understood or managed in isolation are dealt with. We are particularly interested in work that moves beyond describing the need for sustainability to reveal the organisational processes, practices, power relations and institutional conditions through which it is, or is not, achieved.
List of topic areas
Organising through polycrisis: how health and care organisations make sense of, prioritise and act upon overlapping crises, uncertainty and emerging risk.
Managing the polycrisis
Complexity and everyday work: how local actors adapt, improvise and maintain safe care when work-as-imagined and work-as-done diverge.
Sustaining and scaling change: why reforms, innovations and improvement programmes endure, spread, evolve, decay, fragment or are abandoned.
Leadership, power and governance: how authority, accountability, professional hierarchies, institutional logics and political choices shape sustainable action.
Workforce and models of care: what makes workforce reconfiguration, new roles, teamworking and interprofessional collaboration workable, equitable and durable.
Learning health systems: how data, evidence, implementation and continuous evaluation can be organised into genuine learning rather than episodic projects.
Digital health and artificial intelligence: long-term organisational, professional, ethical, equity and environmental implications.
Climate adaptation and mitigation: preparing for climate-related threats while reducing emissions across energy, clinical services and supply chains.
Patients, communities and co-production: meaningful participation in designing and sustaining care.
Comparative and global perspectives: learning across settings and examining how histories, institutions and uneven resources condition what is possible.
Submissions information
Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jhom
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emerald.com/jhom
Authors should select the special issue title “Organising Sustainable Health and Care: Resilience, Adaptation and Transformation in an Era of Polycrisis” from the drop-down menu in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication elsewhere while under review for this journal.
All manuscripts will undergo initial editorial screening and double-anonymous peer review.
Invitation or conference participation does not guarantee acceptance.
Questions about fit may be directed to Professor Catherine Pope (catherine.pope@phc.ox.ac.uk) or Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite (jeffrey.braithwaite@mq.edu.au).
Key deadlines
Opening date for manuscript submissions: 1 October 2026
Closing date for manuscript submissions: 1 March 2027
No separate call for abstracts is proposed.
