A Safety Culture Within The Organization

Employers, managers and supervisors should all ensure that workplace practices reflect the risk assessment and safety statement. Behavior, the way in which everyone works, must reflect the safe working practices laid down in these documents. Supervisory checks and audits should be carried out to determine how well the aims set down are being achieved. Corrective action should be taken when required. Additionally, if a workplace is provided for use by others. The safety statement must also set out the safe work practices that are relevant to them. Hence, it is

The Company’s goal is to have zero work-related illnesses or injuries. However, in order to attain this goal, it will require a team effort involving both the Company and the employees. Only through such a coordinated effort can this safety plan be established and sustained.

To assure quality and to promote a culture of safety, health care organizations must address the problem of behaviors that threaten the performance of the health care team.

The healthcare setting should be a safe environment. By employing the four characteristics of a culture of safety an employer can maintain high employee satisfaction thereby improving retention. People are held responsible for their behavior in this culture but "a distinction is made between errors that result from poor decision making and those that result from system flaws." ("What are the," 2011) The four characteristics are psychological safety, active leadership, transparency and fairness.

Cultivating an organizational culture applies essentially to all industries. For a company such as Chevron, it is imperative that their employees know how much their utmost safety means to them. This is evident in the company’s principles when it comes to practicing safety first, being supportive and looking out for team members (Rossi,

“Organizations with a positive safety culture are characterized by communications founded on mutual trust, by shared perceptions of the importance of safety and by confidence in the efficacy of preventive measures” (Stavrianopoulos, 2012, pg, 202). Communication and teamwork go hand and hand. An effective teamwork involves effective communication. No communication can lead to possible medical errors, whether the failure to communicate comes from the patient to the nurse or between the health care providers. Evidence based care is another factor which aids in safety. “Healthcare organizations that demonstrate evidence-based best practices, including standardized processes, protocols, checklists, and guidelines, are considered to exhibit a culture of safety” (Stavrianopoulos, 2012, pg, 203). Providing better safety means learning from the past mistakes. By understanding the root of the issue, which would then lead to learning how to improve the situation. Educational training about safety should be available for medical staff to attend and learn if there was to be any doubt in he or she’s mind. Patient centered care is another factor in providing safety. It focuses on the patient and their family. Helping patient’s and family be more active in the care of the health plan can lead to safer and better

Many business leaders still do not recognize the importance and value of an effective safety committee. They too often see only the immediate financial aspect/cost of safety-related programs. Employers may think that a safety committee is not needed because it is not required by OSHA. They may think they do not have the resources, time, or funds to create a safety committee. They simply may not have the knowledge of how to attempt to establish one.

Safety is an important function of our daily lives and requires the same attention we give other functions and processes within our daily job routines. Over the years as we continue to do our jobs and the same processes we can become less safe by using short cuts to make a process easier for ourselves. Also, the equipment we use begins to age and breakdown and cause unsafe conditions. Safety professionals use many different types of safety programs to combat safety related issues or problems one may encounter on a job site. Employee involvement is the most important part of any safety program. Without employee involvement safety programs are not as successful, because employees are sometimes not aware of the process and steps in place to protect them.

A culture of safety requires the commitment of leadership to positively impact outcomes. Recent emphasis on the new CMS guidelines and third party reimbursement initiatives associated with patient outcomes, has grabbed the attention of leadership at all healthcare organizations. Additionally, our system wide organization’s employee culture of safety survey has shown that communication and teamwork are areas were improvements are needed. Years of research on communication and teamwork in highly reliable organizations support a correlation with safety. (XX) One of the most important and highly

Effective management structures and preparations are set in place to distribute the policy. The staff are well motivated and are empowered to work safely making sure that they look after their long-term health and not just avoiding small accidents. There are shared common understandings of the businesses values, visions and beliefs. If you have a positive health and safety culture you will know because you will see the visible and active leadership playing a role by the senior

First is collective mindfulness. These means everyone within is expected to understand that issues may arise that can cause serious safety concerns. Safety is everyone’s responsibility as well as collective and shared responsibility (Ratwani, Hettinger and Fairbanks, 2014, p. 3). Second factor is dealing with reporting. There are processes in place that will report safety issues if one arises. The organization makes sure that the reports are easily accessible and useable as well as followed-up with. Lastly, is creating a culture that understands mistakes happen. Staff may not go around blaming others when something is interrupted, it is a team and events take place when humans are involved. This type of culture helps individuals know there are processes in place, provided by leadership to handle these type of serious safety events (Ratwani, Hettinger and Fairbanks, 2014). A major role to implement patient safety is by the use of health IT

Training of supervisors in how to communicate and demonstrate safety practices to employees (Gomez-Melia et al., 2011).

Communicating and reporting are the first steps to change and improving our Safety Culture. Let’s keep moving the needle of Safety awareness in the right direction.

One of the core tenets of promoting patient safety is by creating a culture of safety. An organizational wide commitment to establish and maintain patient safety as the ultimate priority.

As a team player at Beckman we can only improve upon safety when all leadership becomes aware of the commitment to change and empower all players to openly share within the safety platform. When an organization does not make aware a safety program for their team, team members will be unwilling to share in practices and report adverse events and unsafe working conditions due to fear of retaliation or the belief that in the end it will not matter anyway, things will never change, or why report.