NUR/LDR 630 Health Care Culture

NUR/LDR 630 Health Care Culture

Health care organizations adopt different operation models depending on many factors, including patients’ conditions, flow, and health care resources. Despite these differences, they usually focus on optimizing care quality and ensuring that patients are safe when receiving care. It is also crucial to ensure that health care providers are physically, mentally, and emotionally stable to assist patients. Accordingly, organizational cultures should be dominated by behaviors that promote quality care and patient safety. The goal should be achieving excellence always. The purpose of this paper is to define health care culture, describe principles for building a culture of excellence and safety, and explains how Christian Worldview principles can improve ethical practices.

Defining Health Care Culture, Including Culture of Excellence and Safety

A culture represents the social behaviors, beliefs, and customs of a particular population or society. It has more to do with the highly regarded values and habits that dominate everyday life. The same concept applies to health care culture. Williamsen (2021) described health care culture as behaviors, values, and beliefs cultivated in health care settings to promote health. Its primary purpose is to ensure that the shared values that health care providers adopt are relevant in health practice.

A culture of excellence and safety are interrelated. When promoting a culture of excellence, health care providers consider patient safety a core element. On the other hand, optimizing patient safety enables health care organizations to achieve excellence. As Williamsen (2021) explained, a culture of excellence primarily involves the desire to achieve exemplary results, primarily on health care quality. Such a culture ensures that health care providers work towards purposeful, meaningful goals. A safety culture implies adopting behaviors, practices, and health care models to prevent patient harm (Mannion & Davies, 2018). It is instrumental in achieving quality care and promoting patient satisfaction.

Principles of Building a Culture of Excellence and Safety

Achieving excellence and safety in health care organizations is multifaceted and determined by the principles health care organizations adopt in health care delivery. One of the fundamental principles for building such a culture is a roadmap for change. In this case, health care organizations must understand their current position in terms of performance and outline goals for achieving better outcomes. A roadmap for change also includes practices that promote change, such as evidence-based practice that combines scientific evidence with clinical expertise and patient preferences to improve patient outcomes (Chien, 2019). The organization also works to match or surpass the accepted performance benchmarks.

Besides a roadmap for change, the other principle for building a culture of excellence and safety is knowledge building. Generally, health care providers differ in knowledge, attitudes, and experience. They also adapt differently as situations change. Knowledge building implies making health care providers ready to apply current practices to deliver excellence and optimize patient safety. A perfect scenario where knowledge building is necessary for health practice is integrating technology into patient care. Technologies such as electronic health records make health care more efficient and safe by digitizing clinical tasks (Schopf et al., 2019). However, not all health care providers can use such technologies as situations oblige. Continuous training and other forms of empowerment and capacity building ensure that health care providers are excellently positioned to provide care that address patient needs holistically.

Role of Stakeholders in Improving Health Care Culture

Improving health care culture is highly demanding. It requires stakeholders to understand the need for continuous improvement and remain committed to achieving excellence and safe practices. Organizational leadership is a major stakeholder whose role is critical in achieving high patient outcomes. Seljemo et al. (2020) explained that transformational leaders help health care organizations to build a culture of safety by championing safe practices. Such a culture includes a just culture. In health practice, a just culture encourages employees to report patient safety issues such as medication errors without being held responsible for them. Instead, the system inadequacies leading to the issue are examined, and suitable intervention measures are adopted to prevent future occurrences (Mannion & Davies, 2018). Leadership committed to excellence and safety also commits sufficient resources to improve employees’ knowledge and skills to provide quality care.

Besides leadership, health care providers must also