Å sette noko framfor noko anna». Ein kvantitativ studie om prioritering mellom kommunale rehabiliteringsressursar

This master's thesis is about prioritizing resources within rehabilitation services in Norwegian municipalities. The starting point is the municipal health and care service reablement, and whether investing in this innovative service has led to a change in the total rehabilitation resources. An attempt has been made to find out whether the start-up of reablement has affected other rehabilitation services in the municipalities. Quantitative methods and cross-sectional design, with anonymous questionnaires, were used to obtain information. An email was sent with a link to a questionnaire to 227 municipalities and 99 responses were received, which resulted in a response rate of 45 percent. The informants were mainly leaders in the health and care sector or other professionals who worked with reablement. Responses were received from large and small municipalities, but most of the responses came from small and medium-sized municipalities, which means municipalities with less than 20,000 inhabitants Findings from the research work showed that the introduction of reablement had strengthened the overall municipal rehabilitation services. But there was variation in how the municipalities had chosen to solve the start-up and operation of reablement, both in terms of choice of model and prioritization of resources. An important finding showed that most of the municipalities had to use redistribution of resources at the start of reablement, which means that in order to run reablement they had to take resources from another municipal offer or service. This redistribution of resources mainly seemed to apply to municipalities with less than 20,000 inhabitants. In the textbox at the end of the questionnaire, there was an opportunity to elaborate or add information. Many of the comments in these textboxes showed that there were challenges related to prioritizing resources and interprofessional cooperation, and little focus on preventive work in many of the municipalities.