Creating the Organizational Infrastructure for Patient Safety. Held in Gainesville, FL. on November 16-18, 2002

摘要

Safety efforts in health care have focused primarily on the 'lower level' factors such as workers, their tools, the work team and environment. Factors considered basic to safety in other industries, e.g. institutional culture and the social-regulatory-economic environment have not yet received much attention. This conference brought together 34 experts from organizational behavior, health care management, and health systems research to begin focusing on these higher level factors. Six prominent themes emerged from the 2-day meeting are: The gap between the science of organizational theory and behavior, and the practical world of those who work in health care systems; The issue of abstraction vs. application, the relative value of ideas as opposed to tools; The tension between the empiricism of health services research and the theoretical focus of organization science; The appropriate role of standardization, common in current health care efforts, compared to discretion, which is seen as contextually valuable in organization science; The role of scale, both in its effects in organizations, and in the appropriate level for study or intervention; and The role of institutional and professional culture, in particular how cultural values might be redirected in more useful ways, rather than fundamentally changed.