DEPART

Development of Patient Partnership in the PACA Region

This project revolves around two main objectives:

Characterize the regional landscape and analyze the underlying processes of the ARS initiative (mapping existing patient partnership initiatives across university hospitals, comprehensive cancer centers, and primary care settings; analyzing implementation pathways, barriers, facilitators, and service-user engagement; co-designing operational tools).
Evaluate the outcomes of the ARS action plan at the end of the PRS and beyond (evaluating systemic effects on care practices and interprofessional cooperation in oncology and primary care settings; establishing sustainable evaluation indicators for patient partnership).

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Project period

2026 - 2029

Main investigator

Mathieu Bourhis

SESSTIM member(s) of the project:

Sandrine DE MONTGOLFIER, Agnès DUMAS, Mathieu BOURHIS

Sponsors:

Agence Régionale de Santé Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (ARS PACA)

Partners:

Agence Régionale de Santé (ARS) PACA ; Établissements de santé partenaires de l'enquête (CHU de la région, CLCC, structures de soins primaires)

Research topics:

Participatory approach, care pathway, Health Policy

Research question:

Patient and public partnership has emerged as a key driver to enhance the appropriateness of care and overall health system efficiency. As part of its Regional Health Plan (PRS 2023–2028), the PACA Regional Health Agency (ARS PACA) is driving a transformation to strengthen stakeholder collaboration, with a strategic priority placed on meaningfully integrating service users and patients. This institutional approach relies on internal staff training, regional structuring, and working groups gathering diverse stakeholders (partner patients, healthcare professionals, administrators).

This research project aims to monitor, analyze, and evaluate this institutional strategy. It explores to what extent the ARS action plan succeeds in transforming organizational culture and professional practices - both within the agency and across frontline clinical settings - while identifying potential decouplings between top-down policy aims and everyday institutional routines

Method:

This project draws on a mixed, iterative and concurrent approach, combining public health ethics, the sociology of organisations and the RE-AIM framework withA mixed-methods, iterative, and concurrent design bridging public health ethics, organizational sociology, and the RE-AIM evaluation framework with:

a quantitative component through a regional survey administered to all university hospitals (CHU), comprehensive cancer centers (CLCC), health centers, and multidisciplinary primary care centers across PACA.
a qualitative & ethnographic component: Participant observation within regional working groups (WGs 2, 5, and steering committee); documentary analysis of policy and strategic documents; repeated semi-structured interviews with ARS officers (n=20) and external working group participants (n=15); field-based ethnographic monographs (observations and interviews) across 3 distinct oncology departments and 3 primary care sites.
Co-design & stakeholder engagement with repeated multi-stakeholder focus groups (partner patients, clinicians, healthcare managers, ARS representatives) to formulate monitoring indicators and co-produce actionable policy tools.

Research prospects:

The following perspectives are considered:

Supporting the transition from regional policy ambition to sustainable, institutionalized, and participatory healthcare practices.
Developing concrete operational and decision-support toolkits (ethical guidance, policy briefs, evaluation indicator frameworks).
Providing a transferable analytical framework for implementing and evaluating participatory public health policies at a regional level.