An organization’s culture can have a big impact on its ability to successfully implement quality improvement initiatives. By examining situations where quality improvements were prevented from being implemented, we can learn the elements of a culture that can quickly make improvements impossible even when those improvements will lead to the saving of many, many lives.
Read about these three examples of problematic organizational cultures: this article about Florence Nightingale https://emergingcivilwar.com/2022/09/29/civil-war-medicine-florence-nightingale-the-influencer/; this discussion about Ignaz Semmelweis https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6333090/; and this article about a culture of blame and denial https://healthmanagement.org/c/hospital/issuearticle/going-from-a-culture-of-blame-and-denial-to-a-culture-of-safety. Then, consider what elements of those organizational cultures were problematic. In the examples of Nightingale and Semmelweis, you will also see how these people applied logical analyses (analogous to the problem-solving frameworks discussed in this module) of metrics and data they collected.
In your initial post, address the following:
• Introduce yourself to the class by discussing your background in the nursing and healthcare administration industry.
• Discuss your initial reaction to the examples of resistance to improvement initiatives.
• Describe a few reasons for hesitancy toward the different quality improvement initiatives.
◦ Do you think those reasons apply to today’s healthcare industry?
