Phd in MANAGEMENT, BANKING AND COMMODITY SCIENCES

Thesis title: Building Sustainability at the core of Decision Making. The case of Albanian Healthcare Organisations

This research project is inspired by the desire to study the concept of sustainability and sustainable development in complex and specific contexts of reference, prompted by multiple factors of environmental, cultural and demographic change, such as the case of the health sector, by developing a model concept that reflects the measures of implementing sustainable strategies in health care. Although in recent years the concept of health sustainability has been recognized as a major social and economic concern for several countries, in Albania it has only recently become a focal point of government policy. The appreciation of this concern is also reflected in the National Health Strategy (NHS, 2016 - 2020), a document which, although formally limited to five years, projects the fundamental objectives for improving health care by 2025. In accordance with the European policy framework of the World Health Organization (WHO) for health and well-being "Health 2020", and building on the process of European integration as a driving political and development goal, the Republic of Albania has moved towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This ambitious move has led to the development of various scoreboards to guide the government to provide higher and improved standards in order to guarantee citizens "Good Health and Wellbeing", in harmony with the SDG3 goal. While these assessment frameworks can be applied to sustainability projects in general, on the other hand, it must be stated the difficulty of successfully achieving the actual realization due to the lack of understanding of the concept itself and its importance from the responsible parties in the implementation phase. The need to guarantee a sustainable health service, in compliance with international principles, requires the reading of the methods that measure the effects of the necessary interventions. While previous studies have focused on the assessment of sustainability and sustainable development mainly from the environmental perspective, no empirical research has been done for the national health sector able to address with certainty the issues related to the assessment of the other dimensions of sustainability, in coherence with the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) approach (Elkington, 1997). This research starts from this gap, intending to broaden the investigation into the effects that sustainability has on the health sector in Albania. Transversely with the qualitative approach that analyzes previous studies relating to this field, the quantitative methodology is also used, which forms the theoretical and empirical basis of this study. Given the lack of other previous studies, it creates our conviction on the relevance of the research in the field in which the study is conducted, among other things of great value for all those who want to deepen the discourse of sustainability in the health sector, characterized by complexity, dynamism and innovation, strictly connected to organizational developments. Keywords: HealthCare Systems, Organisational Sustainability, Sustainable Development, Managerial Attitudes