Healthcare Services to Socially Marginalized Men: A qualitative study on municipal employees’ experiences with supporting unmet healthcare needs

This study aimed to explore key municipal employees’ experiences and perceptions of how to support socially marginalised men’s healthcare needs. The paper is based on 21 interviews with employees and managers from different policy sectors in a large Danish municipality who either work purposefully with targeting services to men in general or offering services that socially marginalised men will encounter. The findings reveal that regardless of policy sector, the participants perceived that interdisciplinary cooperation across policy sectors was crucial because the socially marginalised men had intertwined social and health challenges. The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s theoretical concepts of differentiation and independency was used in the discussion to offer insight into the way systems work and how society handles its own problems. Organisational structures such as functional differentiation with specialization, division of labour, and increased autonomy seem to challenge the cooperation across policy sectors. Personal interorganisational conditions such as personal knowledge emerging from previous collaborative relationships or personal relations, and not the policy sectors’ integrated work programs seemed crucial. Currently affected the flexibility in services that supported socially marginalised men’s healthcare needs. The findings from this study contribute to the current literature on organisational organisation by providing an important opportunity to advance the understanding of healthcare employees within the municipality, particularly regarding how healthcare is organised across varying professional practices within different policy sectors in relation to supporting socially marginalised men’s healthcare needs.