Patients with any disease depend on the hospital at which they are treated. According to a new study, hospital organization culture plays an essential role in patient care. It suggests, not only can a hospital change its organizational culture for the better, but such improvement allows more patients to survive diseases including heart attacks.
The study also described several strategies that can be used to improve the hospital organizational culture. Although, their effectiveness of them depends on senior management.
Leslie Curry, Ph.D., M.P.H., senior research scientist said, “From previous work, we know that a positive hospital culture impacts AMI mortality rates. Now we can see that organizational culture can, in fact, be changed in positive ways, often with very little expense to the hospital.”
“Most notably, we saw that if hospital administration was open to communication and suggestions from employees–without any fear of retaliation—the team collaboration and success improved.”
For the study, scientists involved 10 hospitals in which 6 showed positive organizational culture changes with faster improvement in AMI survival rates. Although several of the strategies incorporated into the hospital culture was at no expense to the hospital, in some cases, they did mean significant changes in ways of working with both internal and external teams. For instance, hospitals that increased communication with emergency medical teams and pharmacists could provide better care.
Curry said, “We know culture matters–and we can create a good culture with little or no cost strategies. It’s a matter of the hospital teams wanting to work together from the top down and across all departments, and beyond hospital walls into the community.”
Now scientists are planning to create a toolkit of strategies and resources for cultural change that will be available to hospitals nationwide.