Health Center Culture

C4I Culture Assessment and Change Subgroup

Organizational culture is sometimes defined as the combination of unspoken, assumed, and customary ways in which power, information and interpersonal relationships are handled by an organization: “The way we do things around here.” Compared to many sectors, health care employees and management are well aware that organizational culture has an impact on employee working conditions and on the quality and safety of care delivered to patients. Increasingly, healthcare researchers are devoting resources to studying these relationships. Recent findings suggest, for example, that healthcare organizations that emphasize teamwork, coordination, and fairness in general may have better patient outcomes than those that emphasize formal, bureaucratic relationships.

Employee and patient safety can be affected by the organizational culture. Employee perceptions of the organizational culture, often called organizational climate, can lead to a wide array of outcomes. Employee perceptions of a “good” organizational culture that include fairness, intolerance of discrimination, good supervisory and managerial relations, adequate resources, cooperation, and so forth, are strongly related to:

• Improved employee health and satisfaction measured by sick time, lost time, compensation claims, and EEO claims;
• Higher quality and safety of patient care measured by adherence to preventive and chronic care guidelines, patient satisfaction, surgical outcomes, and cost per patient.

Employee perceptions vary. There is never a single ‘culture’ in an organization. Rather, the organization looks different to people in different jobs and at different levels of responsibility. A larger gap between these perceptions is associated with reduced outpatient satisfaction and increased costs per patient. In order to create the cultural change necessary to improve employee working conditions and the quality/safety of patient care, employees’ cultural perceptions were assessed.

An anonymous organization culture survey was prepared by C4I and sent to all employees at all levels. The plan dovetailed with a diversity survey planned by the Office of Diversity Programs and was funded by a grant from Connecticut Health Foundation. The planned survey incorporated questions targeted to diversity issues as well as the broader culture issues at the Health Center.

Co-chairs, C4I Culture Assessment and Change Subgroup

Nick Warren, Sc.D., M.A.T.
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Ergonomic Technology Center

Marie Whalen, M.B.A.
Assistant Vice President
UConn Medical Group