Making Culture Change Happen

Healthcare policy often aims to improve quality and performance through cultural change. This element explores the concept of organizational culture, its link to healthcare quality and performance, and approaches to measuring its impact. It acknowledges the challenges of cultural transformation in healthcare and emphasizes the need for a nuanced and sensitive approach.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 75 pages
Publication date: 24 November 2022
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Healthcare policy frequently emphasizes the importance of cultural change as a means of achieving improved quality of care. This element delves into the concept of organizational culture and explores the evidence linking culture to healthcare quality and performance. It examines the origins of interest in managing culture within healthcare, conceptual frameworks for understanding culture change, and approaches and tools for measuring the impact of culture on quality and performance. It also considers potential facilitators of successful culture change and looks forward to an emerging research agenda. However, given the relatively limited evidence base supporting culture change in healthcare, a more realistic assessment of the task of cultural transformation is warranted. Simplistic attempts to manage or engineer culture change from above are unlikely to yield fruitful results; rather, efforts should be sensitive to the complexity and highly stratified nature of culture within organizations as vast and diverse as the NHS.

This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Weight: 80g
ISBN-13: 9781009236904