Understanding organisational culture for healthcare quality improvement (November 2018)

Summary

In this article, published by the BMJ, Professor Russell Mannion and Professor Huw Davies explore how notions of culture relate to service performance, quality, safety and improvement.

Content

Key messages:

• Organisational culture represents the shared ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving in healthcare organisations.
• Healthcare organisations are best viewed as comprising multiple subcultures, which may be driving forces for change or may undermine quality improvement initiatives.
• A growing body of evidence links cultures and quality, but we need a more nuanced and sophisticated understandings of cultural dynamics.
• Although culture is often identified as the primary culprit in healthcare scandals, with cultural reform required to remedy failings, such simplistic diagnoses and prescriptions lack depth and specificity.