Culture change challenges

To design a new practice seems to be an easy act, but educational change is a process loaded with constrains and drawbacks as educational change really has to be understood as a cultural change involving new approaches and perceptions to learning, education, students and practice. Even more challenging is the cultural elanent... 

The Harvard Executive Session, first described in the Introduction, had a profound personal effect on its participants. This section provides insight into the methodology used to create the environment for such personal transformation to occur. The executive session is a method for creating change in leadership. The executive session model has been replicated in a variety of ways to challenge conventional wisdom and quicken the pace of cultural change in health care and other fields. 

This chapter will help operations managers and safety professionals understand the adverse trending with respect to serious injuries and their costs, the challenges they face in implementing the conceptual and culture changes necessary to reduce serious injuries, and the actions that can be taken to prevent serious injuries. Thus, this chapter presents ... 

The most effective folks in the safety arena aim at creating and sustaining a culture that embeds a total commitment to workplace safety as a core value of the culture, shared and acted upon by all — a Positive Safety Culture , to quote the title of this series. If the personality of their organization does not now include such a visible, systemic commitment to safe work, the most effective safety professionals aim to drive just such a positive change, challenging and changing the existing culture. 

This chapter began with a list of guidelines to initiate and sustain a culture-change process aimed at achieving a Total Safety Culture. Critical challenges include... 

In this book the founders of BST bring their 25 years of expertise in safety science to bear on the critical issue of culture change and the associated leadership imperative required to move the patient safety work forward. While the importance of culture as context to the work at hand is well understood in our field, it often presents itself as an intangible and challenges those who seek to improve it with an inability to understand and measure the success of their efforts. This book helps to demystify this work by providing a structure with which to assess and measure aspects of culture and the impact that leadership can have on it. 

These scientists and engineers represent a special challenge to leadership in that the values and motivations may at times be at odds with corporate cultures that emphasise seniority, authority based on hierarchical influence, allegiance to corporate direction, a strict proprietary view of the results of science and technology, and expectations of instantaneous organisational response to changes in direction. 

A company s culture can make or break even a well-designed data collection system. Essential requirements are minimal use of blame, freedom from fear of reprisals, and feedback which indicates that the information being generated is being used to make changes that will be beneficial to everybody. All three factors are vital for the success of a data collection system and are all, to a certain extent, under the control of management. To illustrate the effect of the absence of such factors, here is an extract from the report into the Challenger space shuttle disaster ... 

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