Health care management review
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A prevailing blame culture in health care has been suggested as a major source of an unacceptably high number of medical errors. A just culture has emerged as an imperative for improving the quality and safety of patient care. However, health care organizations are finding it hard to move from a culture of blame to a just culture. ⋯ Organizational culture or human resource management practices play a critical role in the health care delivery process. Health care organizations need to develop a culture that harnesses the ideas and ingenuity of health care professional by employing a commitment-based management philosophy rather than strangling them by overregulating their behaviors using a control-based philosophy. They cannot simply wish away the deeply entrenched culture of blame nor can they outsource their way out of it. Health care organizations need to build internal human resource management capabilities to bring about the necessary changes in their culture and management systems and to become learning organizations.
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Health Care Manage Rev · Oct 2009
Nursing teamwork, staff characteristics, work schedules, and staffing.
This study aimed to explore whether and how staff characteristics, staffing, and scheduling variables are associated with the level of teamwork in nursing staff on acute care hospital patient units. ⋯ There is a relationship between selected staff characteristics, aspects of work schedules, staffing, and teamwork. Nursing staff want to work where teamwork is high, and perceptions of good staffing lead to higher teamwork. Higher teamwork scores correlated with those who worked less overtime.
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Health Care Manage Rev · Jul 2009
The impact of the work conditions of allied health professionals on satisfaction, commitment and psychological distress.
Allied health professionals are integral to the effective delivery of hospital-based health care, yet little is known about the working conditions associated with the attitudinal and health outcomes of these employees. ⋯ When coupled with previous research involving social support and organizational justice, the findings from this study suggest that initiatives aimed at strengthening supervisor and nonwork support, while enhancing perceptions of organizational fairness, may offer useful avenues for increasing the levels of satisfaction, commitment and well-being experienced by allied health professionals.
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High-performing and high-reliability teams are an important component of service delivery. With a focused emphasis on safety in acute care hospitals, understanding the nature of surgical teams and team performance is an essential component to achieving high-quality surgical care. More information is needed about the challenges to effective team functioning in the operating room, the influence of working conditions, and the environmental context on surgical team performance. ⋯ The surgical event evokes a changing degree of coordination and adaptation to complexity and uncertainty. In such environments, relational coordination through leadership can contribute to a successful surgical result, improvement of the overall process, including error reduction, and enhanced knowledge creation and dissemination, particularly germane in research university teaching hospitals.