scholarly journals Pandemic COVID-19, the High-Reliability Organization (HRO), and the Ecology of Fear

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (12) ◽  
pp. 129-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daved van Stralen ◽  
Thomas Mercer

COVID-19 has changed the social, financial, and political environments for healthcare. Healthcare organizations have abruptly changed operations for a new environment due to pervasive threats to the organization, patients, and healthcare professionals. While the direct, infectious presence of COVID-19 as a threat would seem to cause the greatest stress to the healthcare system, perhaps the absence of the threat may cause more severe and wide-ranging problems. Ecological studies demonstrate a greater decrease in prey populations from the predator’s absence due to an “ecology of fear.” By analogy, organizations share these trait responses and can develop an organizational culture of stress or stress. HRO describes functional traits for effective operations in environments of severe threat.

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melkamu D. Kassa ◽  
Jeanne Grace

Introduction: Physical exercise is recognized as one component of non-communicable disease prevention, but little attention has been devoted to integrating physical exercise into the Ethiopian healthcare system, with the barriers to its inclusion being unclear. Objectives: The present study explores the bottlenecks to integrate physical exercise into the Ethiopian healthcare system to treat non-communicable disease. Design: A mixed method sequential explanatory design. Setting: Public referral hospitals in Ethiopia. Methodology: Data was collected in two phases among 312 (195 males and 117 females) healthcare professionals. The participants were selected proportionately and randomly from 13 public referral hospitals. Results: Lack of: national coordination to promote physical exercise (t (311) = 69.20, p < .0005), trained physical exercise professionals (t (311) = 14.42, p < .0005); physical exercise guidelines (t (311) = 33.25, p < .0005); training how to prescribe physical exercise by healthcare providers (t (311) = 62.94, p < .0005); information on the health benefits of physical exercise to give to their patients (t (311) = 65.62, p < .0005); and built environment that encourages physical exercise participation (t (311) = 59.64, p < .0005) were identified as barriers. Additionally, built environment, policy, healthcare professionals' lifestyle, demography of healthcare professionals, health information coverage of physical exercise and the hospital physical building were also identified as barriers. Conclusions: Physical exercise appears marginalized from the Ethiopian healthcare system. Healthcare organizations and policy makers could take the cited barriers into consideration to plan, design and integrate physical exercise into the healthcare system to prevent NCDs in Ethiopia.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth A. Lown

Despite the current focus on patient centeredness, healthcare professionals face numerous challenges that impede their ability to provide compassionate care that ameliorates concerns, distress, or suffering. These include fragmentation and discontinuity of care, technologies that both help and hinder communication and relationship-building, burgeoning operational and administrative requirements, inadequate communication skills training, alarming rates of burnout, and increased cost and market pressures. A compassionate healthcare system begins with compassionate people, but the organizations in which they train and work must reliably enable them to express and act on their compassion rather than impede it. We present a set of guiding commitments and recommendations to foster a more compassionate healthcare system. We urge healthcare organizations to adopt these commitments and take action to embed compassionate care in all aspects of training, research, patient care and organizational life.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Moutasem A. Zakkar ◽  
Samantha B. Meyer ◽  
Craig R. Janes

PurposeSocial media has made a revolutionary change in the relationship between the customers and business or service providers by enabling customers to publish and share feedback and views about product or service quality. This revolutionary change has not been echoed in some healthcare systems. This study analyses the social media policies of healthcare regulatory authorities in Ontario and explores how these policies encourage or discourage healthcare professionals' use of social media for collecting patient stories and understanding patient experience.Design/methodology/approachThe study used qualitative content analysis to analyse the policy documents, focusing on the manifest themes in these documents. It used convenient sampling to select 12 organizations, including regulating and licensing bodies and health service delivery organizations in Ontario. The authors collected 24 documents from these organizations, including policies, practice standards and social media learning materials.FindingsIn Ontario's healthcare system, social media is perceived as a source of risks to the healthcare professions and professionals. Healthcare regulators emphasize that the codes of conduct and professional standards extend to social media. The study found no systematic recognition of patient stories on social media as a source of information on healthcare quality that can be useful for healthcare professionals.Originality/valueThe study identifies potential unintended consequences of social media policies in the healthcare system and calls for policy and cultural changes to enable the development of safe social media platforms that can facilitate interaction between healthcare providers and patients, when necessary, without the fear of legal consequences or privacy breaches.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. i05 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elina Karalis ◽  
Gaery Barbery

Background: Implementing high reliability organization principles can enhance quality and safety in healthcare. Evidence-based instructions on how to effectively change the organizational culture in healthcare setting are required. Objectives:  A systematic review investigating methods, facilitators, and barriers to assist healthcare organizations in becoming a high reliability organization. Method: Literature searches were performed in PubMed, MEDLINE, CINAHL-Complete, EMBASE, and Scopus for articles published between January 2012 and October 2017. The included articles were case reports, case studies, and protocol development studies on implementing high reliability organization principles. The articles were appraised using a modified Critical Appraisal Skills Programme tool. Thematic synthesis was conducted using manual coding.  Results: Of the 14 eligible articles nine were case studies, four were case reports, and one was a framework development report. The study populations varied from whole healthcare systems to a single department of a hospital. The most common methods were supportive leadership, staff education, and analysing the safety events and sharing the knowledge. Cost was one of the barriers. Remuneration came in reduction of safety events and costs avoided. Conclusion Implementing high reliability organization principles in healthcare settings is slow and challenging, but doing so improves quality, resilience, and safety, thus increasing productivity.


Author(s):  
Stefan Schröder

This chapter addresses secular humanism in Europe and the way it is “lived” by and within its major institutions and organizations. It examines how national and international secular humanist bodies founded after World War II took up, cultivated, and transformed free-religious, free-thought, ethical, atheist, and rationalist roots from nineteenth century Europe and adjusted them to changing social, cultural, and political environments. Giving examples from some selected national contexts, the development of a nonreligious Humanism in Europe exemplifies what Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt call “Multiple Secularities”: different local or national trajectories produced a variety of cultures of secularity and, thus, different understandings of secular humanism. Apart from this cultural historization, the chapter reconstructs two transnational, ideal types of secular humanism, the social practice type, and the secularist pressure group type. These types share similar worldviews and values, but have to be distinguished in terms of organizational forms, practices, and especially policy.


Author(s):  
Michèle Rieth ◽  
Vera Hagemann

ZusammenfassungBasierend auf einer Arbeitsfeldbetrachtung im Bereich der Flugsicherung in Österreich und der Schweiz liefert dieser Artikel der Zeitschrift Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. (GIO) einen Überblick über automatisierungsbedingte Veränderungen und die daraus resultierenden neuen Kompetenzanforderungen an die Beschäftigten im Hochverantwortungsbereich. Bestehende Tätigkeitsstrukturen und Arbeitsrollen verändern sich infolge zunehmender Automatisierung grundlegend, sodass Organisationen neuen Herausforderungen gegenüberstehen und sich neue Kompetenzanforderungen an Mitarbeitende ergeben. Auf Grundlage von 9 problemzentrierten Interviews mit Fluglotsen sowie 4 problemzentrierten Interviews mit Piloten werden die Veränderungen infolge zunehmender Automatisierung und die daraus resultierenden neuen Kompetenzanforderungen an die Beschäftigten in einer High Reliability Organization dargestellt. Dieser Organisationskontext blieb bisher in der wissenschaftlichen Debatte um neue Kompetenzen infolge von Automatisierung weitestgehend unberücksichtigt. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass der Mensch in High Reliability Organizations durch Technik zwar entlastet und unterstützt werden kann, aber nicht zu ersetzen ist. Die Rolle des Menschen wird im Sinne eines Systemüberwachenden passiver, wodurch die Gefahr eines Fähigkeitsverlustes resultiert und der eigene Einfluss der Beschäftigten abnimmt. Ferner scheinen die Anforderungen, denen sie sich infolge zunehmender Automatisierung gegenüberstehen sehen, zuzunehmen, was in einem Spannungsfeld zu ihrer passiven Rolle zu stehen scheint. Die Erkenntnisse werden diskutiert und praktische Implikationen für das Kompetenzmanagement und die Arbeitsgestaltung zur Minimierung der identifizierten restriktiven Arbeitsbedingungen abgeleitet.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 1211
Author(s):  
Matthijs H. J. Smakman ◽  
Koen Smit ◽  
Lotte Buser ◽  
Tom Monshouwer ◽  
Nigel van Putten ◽  
...  

Young pediatric patients who undergo venipuncture or capillary blood sampling often experience high levels of pain and anxiety. This often results in distressed young patients and their parents, increased treatment times, and a higher workload for healthcare professionals. Social robots are a new and promising tool to mitigate children’s pain and anxiety. This study aims to purposefully design and test a social robot for mitigating stress and anxiety during blood draw of children. We first programmed a social robot based on the requirements expressed by experienced healthcare professionals during focus group sessions. Next, we designed a randomized controlled experiment in which the social robot was applied as a distraction method to measure its capacity to mitigate pain and anxiety in children during blood draw in a children’s hospital setting. Children who interacted with the robot showed significantly lower levels of anxiety before actual blood collection, compared to children who received regular medical treatment. Children in the middle classes of primary school (aged 6–9) seemed especially sensitive to the robot’s ability to mitigate pain and anxiety before blood draw. Children’s parents overall expressed strong positive attitudes toward the use and effectiveness of the social robot for mitigating pain and anxiety. The results of this study demonstrate that social robots can be considered a new and effective tool for lowering children’s anxiety prior to the distressing medical procedure of blood collection.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Camila Amaral Borghi ◽  
Regina Szylit ◽  
Carolliny Rossi de Faria Ichikawa ◽  
Michelle Freire Baliza ◽  
Uyara Talmatare Jesus Camara ◽  
...  

Abstract Objective: This study aimed to understand how social networking websites are used by adolescents and their importance during the hospitalization process. Method: A descriptive and qualitative study was supported by the virtual ethnographic method and resorted to the symbolic interactionism as theoretical framework. Eleven hospitalized adolescents were interviewed. Results: Three categories were identified based on the analysis of interviews and posts: Being able to use social networking websites during hospitalization; Using the Facebook® chat to keep connected to friends; Seeking support from friends through social networking websites. Final considerations: Facebook® was the social networking website that adolescents used the most, standing out as an important form of entertainment during hospitalization that facilitates communication and social support. Healthcare professionals should value the use of social networking websites by hospitalized adolescents and encourage access to these tools, providing hospital resources to expand and facilitate this access.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document