The increasing complexity of the United States healthcare system has compounded the likelihood of mistakes. One of the 10 leading causes of death and disability is safety issues with patient care. Medical errors put undue hardship on the economy resulting in the loss of billions of dollars. The current COVID-19 pandemic revealed gaps in public health strategies, medical treatments, comprehensive patient safety, and human resources strategy. Implementing human resources and performance management processes that promote safety, safe decision making, and reduce medical errors is critical. Adopting methods used by high-reliability organizations (HRO) may reduce medical errors and improve patient safety. Qualitative focus groups were used to collect data around creating organizational cultures focused on safety. This research aims to improve performance by providing healthcare leaders with tools to enhance organizational culture, reduce medical errors, and improve patient safety in the age of COVID-19.
TopIntroduction
The increasing complexity of the United States healthcare system has compounded the likelihood of mistakes. Expecting error-free performance from healthcare personnel working in exceedingly high stressed environments is idealistic (World Health Organization, 2019). This topic is essential because medical errors are related to patient safety. Medical errors are “preventable adverse” events occurring during medical care administration that can be harmful to the patient (Carver et al., 2020). Patient safety focuses on preventing and reducing safety hazards, errors, and risks that may happen while providers administer health care (World Health Organization, 2019). The following are five components necessary to execute patient safety:
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Clear-cut guidelines.
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Leadership capability.
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Data to lead safety enhancements.
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Competent health care specialists.
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Patient engagement (World Health Organization, 2019).
Additionally, these five components are not exclusive of one another. Each of these belongs within the organizational system and systematically interacts with the other parts through an inter-related organization design continuum. All these are influenced by human resources and organizational leadership.
TopHuman Resources Organization Design And Systems Theory
Today’s financial markets exist in a hypercompetitive industrial complex. Organizations strive to ensure that they create or maintain a competitive advantage over their market competitors to succeed and survive in this environment (Shufutinsky, 2018). This is achieved through innovation in products, processes, or services (Magretta, 2012), often designed and developed through strategy (Magretta, 2013), as well as through management of both internal and external factors, and align those factors, including organizational structure and processes, to achieve effective strategic change. To ensure this, human resources managers must plan and strategize adequately and engage in business process improvement focused on improving strategy, culture, and operations (Worley, Hitchins, & Ross, 1996). This is accomplished through human resources organizational assessment and design models (Shufutinsky, 2018).
Organizations are complex adaptive systems (Senge, 2014). Human resources and organizational development are grounded in systems thinking, one of the significant aspects that sets the field apart from those like it (Jamieson, 2017; Shufutinsky, 2017; Senge, 2014). Systems thinking addresses that every major part of an organization and its stakeholders (Jamieson, 2017). To expound, each element is part of a more extensive network of components, each with the potential to modify all others, directly or indirectly (Senge, 2014; Shufutinsky & Long, 2017; Shufutinsky et al., 2020). Organization design models, such as Jamieson’s Strategic Organizational Design (SOD) model or Shufutinsky’s Nuclear Organization Framework (NOF), as seen in Figure 1, contend that organizations cannot be effectively changed without changing the culture, which is at the core of the organization, but simultaneously cannot be altered without effectual changes made to the other components of the organizational system by human resources. Thus, there is a complex and ever-changing relationship between the elements in an organization’s design. Human resources practices and policies significantly influence this relationship. This relationship exhibits the systemic nature of organizations and the dynamic, holistic effects that variations make on the entire system, potentially causing significant shifts that result from adaptations to just a few components on their own (Jamieson, 2017; Shufutunsky, 2019).