Our dependent variable was the relative sense of responsibility for adaptation of health care.
Although many governments are assuming the responsibility of initiating adaptation policy in relation to climate change, the compatibility of "governance-for-adaptation" with the current paradigms of public administration has generally been overlooked.
Table 4 displays the distribution of the relative responsibility for adaptation in health care according to the health professionals.
First, responsibility for adaptation is multidimensional, depending on the nature of the adaptation required by the situation.
Our results showed that the sense of responsibility for the adaptation of health care depended on the nature of the adaptation required: when the adaptation directly concerned communication with the patient, health professionals declared that they should be the ones to adapt; in relation to cultural preferences, however, the responsibility felt on the patient's shoulders.
This assumption has often remained at the level of theory and it is still unclear whether health professionals feel responsible for the entire process of adaptation to ethnic diversity or whether they feel that this responsibility is shared with patients.
Three dimensions emerged from the factor analysis: responsibility for the adaptation of communication, responsibility for the adaptation to the negotiation of values, and responsibility for the adaptation to health beliefs.
We observe that the management of adaptation is typically the responsibility of intelligent agents operating in a multi-agent system, but that dealing with openness, selfdetermination or fulfilment and violation of contracts requires conventional, mutually-agreed and mutable rules.
Each item ranges from 1 to 7, 1 meaning full agreement that adaptation is the responsibility of the health professional and 7 meaning full agreement that adaptation is the responsibility of the patient.
The results imply that attitudes to responsibility for the adaptation of health care depend on the nature of the adaptation required: when the adaptation directly concerned communication with the patient, health professionals declared they are the ones to adapt, but for cultural preferences the responsibility seems to fall on patients' shoulders.
