There is a trend in health systems around the world to place great emphasis on and faith in improving ‘leadership’. Leadership has been defined in many ways and the elitist implications of traditional notions of leadership sit uncomfortably with modern healthcare organisations. The concept of distributed leadership incorporates inclusivity, collectiveness and collaboration, with the result that...

Aim – To discuss why adult patients continue to unnecessarily die. Background Healthcare professionals are failing to recognise signs of physiological deterioration. As a result adult patients are unnecessarily dying. This is despite international healthcare policy requiring healthcare professionals are appropriately trained to recognise the deteriorating adult patient. Design – A discussion pa...

In a changing context, the use of knowledge management (KM) generates value and long-lasting competitive advantage. As critical issue for societal development, sustainable organisations must consider relationship between KM healthcare. They investigate how is created identify potential predictors knowledge-sharing behaviour to support hospital’s long-term knowledge-management strategy. Managers...

Social welfare and healthcare professionals consider their services fragmented, which also impacts information technology (IT) deployment. They also face the question of whether to cooperate with other organisations in IT. The need to cooperate and to organise cooperation has increased with ever-wider IT deployment. Governance of IT helps in this by defining the responsibilities of cooperating ...

Information systems (IS) are nowadays extensively used to support all kinds of activities in healthcare organisations. Enterprise modelling can help to make the use of IS in healthcare more effective by providing process and domain models reflecting a particular healthcare unit. This paper proposes a model of the ward round process in a healthcare unit. The proposed model identifies the roles o...

‘whistleblowing’ has come to increased prominence in many health systems as a means of identifying and addressing quality and safety issues. but whistleblowing – and the reactions to it – have many complex and ambiguous aspects that need to be considered as part of the broader (organisational) cultural dynamics of healthcare institutions.

OBJECTIVE Concerns about care quality have prompted calls to create workplace cultures conducive to high-quality, safe and compassionate care and to provide a supportive environment in which staff can operate effectively. How healthcare organisations assess their culture of care is an important first step in creating such cultures. This article reports on the development and validation of a too...