Organizational Culture Influences on Continuous Improvement

Quality Assurance
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Quality Assurance
Organizational Culture
Organizational culture is a crucial characteristic that affects the efficiency or inefficiency of giving quality health care services. An organizational culture (OC) is popular assumptions that guide what occurs in an organization by elaborating appropriate behavior in several situations. OC can include values, norms, assumptions, philosophies, and beliefs that create a certain image that affects how people interact with one another or their clients (Lam et al., 2012). This set of assumptions form behavior patterns that can affect the overall service delivery.
Staff nurses play an important role in influencing either positively or negatively the entire culture of a health organization. Nurse management leaders should develop educational programs to popularize constructive culture styles and minimize aggressive or defensive cultures. When an organization’s members believe and uphold positive organizational culture, they are more likely to deliver quality services to patients, have job satisfaction promote personnel and patient safety, and uphold a positive financial performance.
The OC of a facility can significantly affect the nurses’ work environment (Lam et al., 2012). However, managing the success or failure of the type of culture practiced within an organization is extremely hard. In complex medical facilities with many professional groups, there are likely multiple independent cultures that may not favor changes that support continuous healthcare improvement (Aul et al., 2021). There is a need to emphasize the collaboration within healthcare organizations to eliminate cultural differences that may inhibit group efforts.
Continuous Improvement in Healthcare
Globally, healthcare organizations are looking forward to the principle of continuous improvement. Continuous improvement (CI) is a lean process improvement concept whose aim is to attain maximum customer benefit by lowering the elements that hinder quality service delivery. A CI project is aimed at creating a plan that sustains changes that promote value and reduce waste. Healthcare services are analyzed by observing value-based metrics such as patient results (Vinagre et al., 2018). It’s a shift from the previous volume-based metric, and it has forced nursing leaders to change the outlook, resource allocation, and the overall focus on patient care.
The main focus of CI projects is identifying the factors that determine the success of an employee. A change in employee attitudes can promote positive long-term performance. This behavior change enhances a positive healthcare environment, and hence it gives a long-term cultural transformation. The main challenges that oppose CI include conflicting goals and objectives among staff, inadequate managerial support, and scarce resources.
Empowering health workers to provide high-quality, safe, and reliable care will enhance CI. Health reforms will provide a harmony of effective governance, the development and enforcement of a transformative capacity, and leadership involvement in the medical profession to cater to wide system goals (Lapina ...