Interventions in Healthcare, Coursework Example

Health care organization are at the forefront in making significant changes to how work is planned, staff is deployed, and how the hospital personnel understand and applies its culture leading to patients’ safety. For these changes to be successful, the leadership must be able to alter the physical environment and the attitudes and behaviors of the nurses and other healthcare professionals. Also, the changes must influence leaders within the healthcare organization who set the norms or rules that influence the healthcare environment. Balancing the tension between production efficiency and reliability, actively managing the change process, and creating and maintaining trust across the hospital are among the management practices consistently linked to the successful implementation of change initiatives and the achievement of the safety of patients within medical centers. Involving nurses in decisions about workflow and design is another intervention, employing knowledge management techniques to turn the company into a learning organization. In the work settings of nurses, these management practices, which are crucial for maintaining patient safety, are not routinely used.

According to Cummings & Worley (2015, p. 318), to fully ensure the benefits of the management techniques outlined above, transformational leadership and action from each medical institution’s board of directors and senior and midlevel management are required to push medical institutions to greater heights. In many hospitals, leadership has been seen to be the crucial first step in achieving patient safety. The chief nursing officer’s engagement in fundamental clinical improvements, for instance, has a considerable favorable impact on the cost results of reengineering in acute care hospitals. Among nurses and other employees in medical facilities, leadership practice has also been linked to higher job satisfaction, productivity, and organizational commitment (Cummings & Worley, 2015, p. 59). Leadership is demonstrated through motivating and inspiring nurses and other healthcare professionals to behave in ways that reflect their beliefs, motivations, and requirements.

Cummings & Worley (2015, p 368) posit that Several particular activities taken by leaders can result in transformational leadership. First, hospital executives take the initiative to build connections with nurses and other healthcare professionals and commit to them. This endeavor entails developing formal, continuing systems encouraging two-way communication and knowledge sharing. In addition, hospital administrators like the chief nursing officer are crucial in preserving and fostering the connection with nurses. Most importantly, according to Cummings & Worley (2015, p 48), leaders work to fulfill the needs, wants, and other motivations of nurses in addition to their own. Only by maintaining a constant flow of conversation and exchanging information and ideas with nurses can one come to understand their desires, needs, and motivations. By attending to their nurses’ needs and educating them about their shared goals, the CEO and chief nursing officer transform and elevate nurses’ motivations, values, and objectives. To do this, leaders may need to adapt how they lead to consider nurses’ preferences.

To increase patient safety in hospitals, leaders such as the CEO and nurse managers should strike a balance between effectiveness and dependability Cummings & Worley (2015, p 392). To provide care more effectively, these leaders should evaluate their working procedures and implement work-process reform projects. Efficiency sometimes calls for carrying out production tasks in the most economical and timely manner. Companies across various sectors frequently aim to increase efficiency by outsourcing work, reducing expenses and downsizing. For instance, high-reliability hospitals employ the deliberate integration of staff and equipment redundancy into various areas of job design to promote safety. This redundancy leaves the system with some room so that if one element in the work production process breaks down, a substitute will be ready to take over. The redundancy and other high-reliability medical institution characteristics include; taking care of the interdependencies of work production processes, cross-training staff, and encouraging inter-and intragroup communication (Cummings & Worley, 2015, p. 196). However, performance reliability competes with productivity as a main organizational aim in high-reliability firms, and such task components are seen as necessary. Hospitals may balance dependability and production efficiency by harmonizing and balancing their pay mechanisms, accountability structures, incentive, reward, and organizational goals.

One of the management strategies necessary for patient safety is building and maintaining trust. The ability to be open to another person’s intentions has been described as trust. It is strongest when parties perceive one another to be capable and to have their best interests in mind Cummings & Worley (2015, p 276). Nurses willingly donate their efforts most of the time without anticipating an instant reward when trust connects people and groups to organizations. Additionally, it strengthens the ability of the CEO and Chief Nursing Officer to rely on nurses to act in the best interests of the business. It has been discovered that employee turnover is inversely connected to workers’ faith in organizational leaders and directly correlated with favorable economic results, such as improved sales and profitability.

Furthermore, trust has the added benefit of enhancing employees’ capacity for change by lowering the discomfort and uncertainty associated with it. This would otherwise limit adaptability for individuals and groups and boost employees’ willingness to take risks. Fostering trust across the medical institution is essential for the open and honest communication required for successful organizational change. The amount of information shared between people and individuals in organizations is significantly influenced by the level of trust between the company and its workers (Cummings & Worley, 2015, p. 285). Nevertheless, when there is a lack of trust, participants are less likely to accept leaders’ advice and put out the additional work, involvement, and expertise required to ensure that change is effective. When nurses and other providers participating in a change have confidence in one another, it is simpler to communicate, ignore differences, and work together.

Since large organizational change is challenging for all medical institutions to manage, actively controlling the transition process is crucial to patient safety Cummings & Worley (2015, p 365). Previously, healthcare organizations had a history of unsuccessful attempts at organizational change. Thus, it has remained vulnerable to poor implementation of change despite its extensive expertise in introducing new medical technology. Numerous studies and publications have provided frameworks, models, and instructions for implementing change. To successfully execute change, their importance is primarily on human resource management techniques, including continuing communication, training, the use of methods for assessment, feedback, redesign, persistent attention, and employee participation. Successful organizational change programs in hospitals depend on continuous communication across many mediums. While poor communication poses serious risks to the safety of the patients, effective communication is a strong change facilitator to care for patients effectively. Training is also necessary for effective transformation since it frequently necessitates that people take on new roles and responsibilities (Cummings & Worley, 2015, p. 392). Currently, various hospitals undertake reengineering programs. These hospitals indicate that the demand for new knowledge is frequently overestimated, leading to periods of declining quality and inefficiency. Specialized training is required in knowledge management, task redesign, mistake avoidance and detection, and change management.

Cummings & Worley (2015, p. 378) assert that participating nurses in workflow and job design decisions is beneficial and suitable for organizational transformation and growth.  Evidence-based research has established that both technology and human potential have advanced since the start of the industrial revolution. In the early twentieth century, a helpful bureaucratic structure in organizations was inappropriate for many organizations today. Strongly hierarchical organizational structures and the ensuing hierarchical decision-making are hindered in their capacity to adapt to highly variable events and are linked to worse safety. Studies of high-reliability companies demonstrate that flexible decision-making at the lowest level possible in accordance with the knowledge at hand is the key to effective decision-making.

Further, Cummings & Worley (2015, p. 376) indicate that participation in decision-making has been investigated in nursing research, such as clinical autonomy, shared governance, nursing empowerment, and control over nursing practice. These structures share a few characteristics. A decentralized, shared governance strategy offers nurses more power and influence over their professional lives and working conditions.

According to the final evidence-based management practice, all healthcare companies must transform into learning organizations (Cummings & Worley, 2015, p 200). One of the fundamental traits of high-performing organizations in postindustrial societies has been identified as the ongoing acquisition and management of knowledge. According to business and economist strategists, managing an organization’s intellectual assets is more crucial to its competitive advantage in the modern economy than managing bureaucratic control over its capital resources. Cummings & Worley (2015, p 206) indicate that continuous organizational learning has also been crucial in establishing and maintaining patient safety in hospitals. This idea is especially important for a high-tech sector of the economy like healthcare, which is marked by a rapid acceleration of scientific and technological advancements. Health care expertise, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and technology must advance to increase hospital patient safety.

Moreover, Cummings & Worley (2015, p. 314) state that a learning organization is proficient in knowledge creation, acquisition, transfer, and behavior modification to consider fresh information and understanding. Learning companies actively manage the learning process by utilizing all available knowledge sources, conducting rigorous internal experimentation to produce new information, and swiftly and effectively disseminating knowledge across the firm. To enhance the organization’s production processes, medical institutions employ these procedures to develop better work tools, processes, systems, and structures.

As a result, nursing leadership in hospitals and other healthcare organizations plays a crucial role in how patients are cared for and how the nurse workforce is deployed in these organizations as a whole (Cummings & Worley, 2015, p 78). The ability of hospital nursing leadership to, first, provide clinical leadership in support of nursing staff’s knowledge acquisition and uptake, second, facilitate direct-care nurses’ input into decision-making on the design of work processes and workflow, and lastly, represent nursing staff and management to one another and facilitate their mutual trust. Chief nursing officers (CNOs) should be considered crucial members of a hospital’s executive management team, according to a 1983 national Commission of Nursing study and the American Hospital Association (Cummings & Worley, 2015, p 83). Efforts to integrate services and reengineer hospitals have expanded the CNO’s responsibility over the past 20 years. These hospital nurse executives’ new, broader responsibilities included overseeing the cardiology, surgery, emergency, and radiology departments and nursing homes, outpatient services, admissions, and infection control units.

References

Cummings, T. G. & Worley, C. G. (2015). Organizational Development and Change, 10th ED.