Changing an organizational culture

Changing an organizational culture

Changing an organizational culture requires planning from the observed challenges to make a change. For a proper accomplishment of the healthcare reform to reduce medical errors in the healthcare system, a well-structured and authentic timeline must be developed and involve all associated parties in the system. The consideration takes the short, mid, and long term goals to have a gradual guide and steps for timely strategic planning. First, the short term goals are inclusive of the initial phase of raising the awareness of the associated groups, which is among the staff of the growing medical errors and the necessity of implementing the change. On the other hand, the next goal is to report the best experience of care from the patient’s as well as improved communication appropriateness between the staff and patients, patient to staff, and the seniors and the other subordinate staff. The short terms goal is required to have been through by the next six months upon the implementation.

The mid-term goals are concerned with the reduction of cost due to proper communication of hand-off and technology realm by reducing the occurrence of errors, increase patient safety. Patient safety in the hands of the healthcare giver should be done by establishing training programs and Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) initiatives. Also, it would be essential to improve the scoring on annual Healthcare Centers Reviews through consulting a joint commission survey to understand the progress of the cultural practice and observation of patient safety, which in turn reduces the risk. The goals are necessary as they help to keep up with a well-designed strategic plan aligned with achieving the long-term goals. Hence, it should be accomplished and instilled into practice after two months, implying between the sixth and eighth months.

Lastly, the long-term goals are designed to completely change the initial governance in social culture and start to observe the safety of patients before administering the treatment or medication or surgery to be curtained. The change in the practice is to ensure the medical error has an overall improvement in the care quality of medication, prevention of falls, minimize or eradicate adverse medical mistakes, to raise the entire patient’s safety and confidence. Also, it will improve the effectiveness of communication plan the patients’ care demands along with establishing confidentiality between the various department and the rest of the staff towards mitigation and eradication of unnecessary errors that lead to loss of resources. The latter is the end goal of implementing the plan. However, it might not be the end as the organization might strive to provide the best of its efforts toward minimizing risk to patients, using additional resources that might have been prevented. Instead of offering a refreshment course on key core competence might emphasize care and caution when dealing with the patients.

Furthermore, care tends to be safe, patient-centered, accessible, and comprehensive and coordinated, which complies with the legislation and regulation standards. These objectives are outlined to fight against the issue of error heads on to compel the organizational goals. The processes such as observation are suitable to assist the administration and the management to determine the occurrence of errors along with considering the traditional approaches to identify and prevent the causes of errors such as the root-cause analysis, which are often passive and might emphasize on individual factors. The active surveillances of the healthcare providers concerning the system are required to be in the front line to understand the areas where the medical error might emerge and prevent it before it is too late. It can be done through evaluating the process through assessing the context of error, reconnaissance gathering, stakeholder engagement, program description along with evaluation focus of shared lessons and responsibility.

The potential Barriers

The awareness of the crucially and significance of prevention of medical error along with the consequences of both patient safety and healthcare quality is progressing. Therefore, the strategies of medical strategic planning should always be available to reduce the error at the forefront of the healthcare system and governance. The emphasis on ethics is the essential aspect since if the nurses or any other caregivers understand their responsibility toward the patient’s care, the error might be minimized. However, the potential barrier that comes in in prevention of medical error is resistance or reluctant to change. Even if the policies and procedures are enacted in this organization, various healthcare providers and workers might resist since they could be not familiar and comfortable with the way the new system m works. Also, the lack of error reporting in healthcare usually propagates the threats as the facility might not understand that medical errors are affecting the organization. The reason is that an organization converts threats and error into opportunities and measures of improvement when learning from the mistakes. Besides, neither the healthcare nor the corporate governance advises the employees or the board of staff when the medical error occurs but keep the issue under the water.

Moreover, the healthcare system, according to Poorolajal, Rezaie, Aghighi (2015), indicated that recurrent mistakes are occurring in different healthcare settings and patient’s proceeds to get harmed and injured through issues that might have been prevented. The reason is that the staff upon encountering the medical errors do not report to the administration even upon investigation as they hold it was making the situation worse. The ethical and key competence of the nurses and other healthcare practitioners is neglected and sometimes causes unnecessary mistakes that might have been prevented by following the right procedure.

However, the strategies that can overcome this barrier are the improvement of accountability for simple safety habits. In case a small discussion is initiated between the management and the employees concerning the current causes of the error in the facility, the accountability as well as the awareness can be shed to light and become an entity of change. Instead of blaming a single person, the organization can act as a team to work together and fix the issue for the sake of the healthy and safeties of the patients. Thus, by collaboration and establishing the right procedures and legislation of monitoring and verifying each case and diagnosis appropriateness. A drastic measure can be established through staffing, training, and educating the health providers about the importance of using the EHR records well and monitoring the inpatient’s movement to reduce chances that might result in injury.

Reducing errors through a culture of Safety

For healthcare to have reduced the chance of medical error, the organization must establish a culture of safety. Vagues et al. (2016) argued that a safety culture is effective at reducing the error since it associates people and imbues them to consider sufficient time in their approach, outlook, and priorities to make sure they achieve a sustainable and collective response that might be impossible at the individual level. The value installation, attitude along with norm of behaviors wherein safety is focused on all care delivered aimed at safety. All the entire team members in the organization must be committed to the reduction of error during the delivery period and responsible for investigating collaboratively on issues that pose a risk and challenges to patient care delivery.

However, even if it might be challenging to attain a culture of safety due to difficulties in observing the safest route of action, a well-organized facility can mitigate the threat. The reason is that due to the complexity of healthcare and medicine and human beings, the preventive measure of harm to either the healthcare give or patient is not always easy. Therefore, healthcare practitioners are not always sure about what causes the error or appropriate response to the issue, which might affect the establishment of safety culture. Thus, will a well organized and structured governance sharing of ideas, making decisions, and establishing an area of threat might help to reduce the medical error, which has diverse effects on the concerned parties. Finally, the nature of healthcare develops an environment fir routine failure in operation, such as missing equipment and inadequate supplies. With the close monitored, follow-ups, and regular checklist update along with proper communication channels, can help reduce the threats or risk of harming the patients.

Conclusion

Eventually, medical error in the US has progressively plagued present healthcare and has emerged as a social issue in public. These errors cause a substantial cost to patients and healthcare systems, insurance companies, physicians, and taxpayers. Also, they have led to malpractice litigation in the disclosure and apologies for most error occurrence results in decreased claim rates. The expected outcomes in the reform of medical care in the reduction of errors are by improving the frequency of medical errors in the health facility. Communication efforts in hand-off and technology through EHR will improve collaboration to help implement patient checklist and appropriate team communication. The stakeholder wills, in turn, be invested in promoting simple safety habits for healthcare to patients. The ethical consideration and key competence also propagate the occurrence of error due to lack of responsibility and accountability as demanded by the code of ethics and standards provided by rules and regulations. To reduce the error evaluation process of change in plan and dissemination plan helps change and reduce errors through short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals in evaluating the overall medical error and enhance safety precautions. However, with strong corporate governance along with committed social responsibility, there would be a culture that observes, detect, and prevent medical errors. Hence, with a safety culture healthcare system is in a line of achieving high reliability, which might turn to reduced adverse events and leap the benefits.