Making Culture Change Happen

Unpacks what is meant by organisational culture and explores the evidence for linking it to healthcare quality and performance.

Russell Mannion (Author)

9781009236904, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 November 2022

75 pages
23 x 15.1 x 0.3 cm, 0.08 kg

Healthcare policy frequently invokes notions of cultural change as a means of achieving improvement and good-quality care. This Element unpacks what is meant by organisational culture and explores the evidence for linking culture to healthcare quality and performance. It considers 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 considers potential facilitators of successful culture change and looks forward towards an emerging research agenda. As the evidence base to support culture change is rather thin, a more realistic assessment of the task of cultural transformation in healthcare is warranted. Simplistic attempts to manage or engineer culture change from above are unlikely to bear fruit; rather, efforts should be sensitive to the complexity and highly stratified nature of culture in an organisation as vast and diffuse as the NHS. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

1. Introduction
2. The Origins of Current Interest in Organisational Culture
3. What is Organisational Culture?
4. Measuring and Assessing Culture
5. Making Culture Change Happen
6. Conclusions
7. Further Reading
Contributors
References.

Subject Areas: Health systems & services [MBP], Public health & preventive medicine [MBN], Medical research [MBGR]