Accountability in Healthcare Organizations

Accountability in Healthcare Organizations

Introduction

Organizational accountability involves defining an organization’s mission, values, and desired goals and employees’ roles and responsibilities towards achieving them effectively and successfully. As a result, it is about holding an organization’s executives and employees responsible for accomplishing desired goals and objectives, completing specific assignments and responsibilities, and most importantly, making effective decisions that will help deliver these expectations. As a result, accountability plays a critical role in influencing an organization’s performance, productivity, and success. The paper’s primary focus will be on the importance of accountability, particularly in healthcare institutions. Besides, the paper will also discuss how the accountability of employees is measured and, most importantly, how it applies to specific ethical considerations in healthcare leadership and management.     

Importance

Healthcare service providers play a critical role in determining health outcomes, the satisfaction of patients in services provided, and the general performance of their organization. To ensure positive and desired outcomes, any healthcare institution needs to ensure its employees, leaders, and manager are accountable for all processes involved. Logically, accountability is incredibly important in the healthcare industry (Kaufman et al., 2019). Some of its importance include;

Improve Quality of Care

The satisfaction of patients is one of the most important objectives in any healthcare institution. However, satisfaction can only be achieved through improved healthcare services that ensure patients’ needs have been met in the best way possible. Accountability ensures healthcare service providers understand their roles and responsibilities in ensuring high-quality care for all patients. This case means accountability helps employees understand how best and effective they will provide healthcare services, respond to possible issues that may arise in the workplace, and most importantly, work towards common goals, objectives, mission, and visions of the organization.           

Commitment

To increase the performance of healthcare service providers, they must have a high level of commitment. Accountability, therefore, ensure employees in a healthcare institution have a high level of dedication, particularly in completing their role and responsibilities. Commitment improves the performance of healthcare providers, thus improving productivity. Besides, accountability also helps employers to grow in self-control as they understand they will have to answer to any choice or action they make in general (Lee et al. 2019).

Improve Clarity and Creativity

Accountability allows healthcare organizations and their employees to define their goals and, most importantly, craft effective and reliable plans to support their operations. As a result, a healthcare organization can clarify what they want, why they want it, and how best to achieve these desires. Evaluating an organization’s goals and plans helps them to be well-defined as possible, particularly by monitoring their progress. Besides, it also helps to eliminate excuses and remove any distractions, thus focusing on improving performance and impacts towards all patients.

In creativity, accountability ensures effectiveness in the ability of healthcare organizations and their employees to understand different situations and develop effective responses to them. Unlike most industries, the healthcare industry has little room for mistakes (Kaufman et al., 2019). These mistakes can result in far damaging negative impacts on the organization and, most importantly, on patients. Accountability helps team members to become creative in dealing with and responding to possible errors that may have a negative or undesired outcome on the patients and the organization.    

Competence        

Employees’ and an organization’s competence play a substantial role in improving the performance and impact of any healthcare on societies and patients. To remain competent, healthcare institutions must achieve high levels of accountability. Accountability focus on the performance of team members and the organization in general. As a result, it helps to influence positive operations and ensure team members focus on specific goals and objectives, thus allowing these organizations to easily and successfully reach their goals and objectives.  

Satisfaction

The satisfaction of team members influences and improves the general performance of a healthcare institution or environment. While accountability helps team members achieve more goals and objectives, it also helps them by giving them a chance to celebrate their accomplishments towards their organization. Employees understand that they are accountable for the general performance and success of the organizations and are greatly appreciated for the efforts and sacrifices they make to ensure organizational goals and objectives have been achieved. Besides, it also helps to improve trust between team members and their leaders (Lee et al. 2019). As a result, employees are more likely to work harder to achieve more goals and objectives. As a result, it helps the organization and its employees to enjoy their success and, most importantly, keep moving forward, particularly by establishing new goals and objectives.

These positive impacts of accountability in a healthcare organization benefit not only patients but also healthcare service providers and the organization in general. Accountability helps set specific procedures and plans that healthcare service providers must follow to ensure effectiveness and positive outcomes in achieving organizational goals and objectives while providing quality and best care for patients. As a result, it helps to improve the quality of health and care for involved people. Accountability, therefore, has positive impacts on the performance of healthcare providers and the organization and, most importantly, on patients (Kaufman et al., 2019).       

Measurement of Employees’ Accountability 

In most cases, accountability tends to increase if measured within any healthcare organization. This case means that if there is no specific way to prove if employees are accountable for their mistakes or failure, there will be less incentive to put more effort into different tasks. In general, most healthcare organizations measure financial and performance accountability. Financial accountability will focus on tracking and reporting the use of different monetary resources. On the other hand, performance accountability involves measuring how well staff members can meet specific goals and, most importantly, how effective they are in scoring on satisfaction surveys of patients.  

Regarding the relationship between employees and patients, measuring accountability is critical in helping patients struggling with progress or changing harmful behaviors (Nathan et al. 2019). In such cases, healthcare organizations tend to regularly set times and discuss their clients to evaluate their development. For example, healthcare organizations tend to talk with their clients about their progress, where they stand at any specific moment, and most importantly, where they believe there are heading (Lee et al. 2019). If these patients have accomplished many goals, employees are accountable for different types of care offered. If they have not accomplished any goals, the accountability of employees may not have been achieved. Such a situation will require the organization to ask questions and, most importantly, determine any specific and necessary change to increase the accountability of healthcare providers. 

Logically, accountability can be considered as a two-way street. As a result, an organization can also measure employees’ accountability by considering their performance through customers’ assessments. By measuring the performance of employees and the organization, it became easy for a healthcare organization to grow employees professionally and, most importantly, help to improve outcomes among all patients Lewis et al 2019).          

Accountability in Ethical Leadership and Management

Accountability plays a substantial role in ethical considerations in both leadership and management. In leadership and management, being accountable means that leaders and managers accept specific responsibilities related to their conduct and actions, particularly in a transparent manner. Consequently, ethical leaders and managers within any healthcare organization will focus on inspiring the ethical conduct of team members, particularly by holding them accountable for their actions, decisions, and behaviors. Practically, healthcare organizations have become increasingly dependent on how they interact with the outside world and, most importantly, with employees (Shanafelt et al. 2019). As a result, ethical considerations have become crucial in the ways healthcare organizations are perceived. Besides, ethical consideration concerning accountability depends on how team members work with the organization and, most importantly, how they interact with the goals and objectives of their organization.     

To remain accountable, leaders and managers in healthcare organizations must take different and reliable steps to ensure all employees and patients and ethically taken care of in different situations. As a result, ethical considerations help in leading healthcare organizations. This case means that leaders and managers are accountable for different internal and external factors. Externally, accountability helps leaders improve the organization’s performance in the work environments (Shanafelt et al. 2019). Externally, accountability ensures the team is intact with highly productive and happy employees.

Checks-and-Balances Process   

In any successful organization, the checks-and-balances process ensures positive outcomes in reducing mistakes or preventing undesired behaviors. In most cases, this balance is important when one person has too much control. Logically, any organization is all about balance to ensure effectiveness and positive outcomes in its performance. As a result, successful organizations effectively find the right balance to help keep all processes intact and move forward efficiently and, most importantly, in an orderly way (Liu, 2019). It, therefore, help to ensure all work within the organization gets done and done perfectly. This case means that different departments and employees understand their specific roles and how best they can complete them to improve performance and ensure positive outcomes (Liu, 2019). In general check-and-balances process allow an organization to become successful by influencing how different roles are performed and how well employees accomplish their organizational goals and objectives.

Accountability Impact on Organizational Culture 

A healthy culture of accountability improves the productivity and creativity of employees in the work environment. As a result, it contributes significantly to furthering organizational goals and objectives. It creates a culture where employees focus on taking ownership of their responsibilities while building more trust between involved team members at different levels or departments of the organization. This case means all individuals within the organization follow through on promises, avoid blaming each other, and support each other with a primary aim of achieving organizational goals and objectives, thus creating a positive and healthy work culture (Lewis et al. 2018).

Maintaining Positive Working Culture

To marinating a positive working culture, a healthcare organization must ensure all team members understand their roles and responsibilities towards the organization and, most importantly, towards each other and patients. The primary focus should be on fostering mutual respect, establishing trust among members, and encouraging all employees to take responsibility for their actions, decisions, and behaviors. Training and educating employees on remaining accountable is also important in maintaining a positive working culture.                

Conclusion

Accountability is of substantial essence in healthcare organizations. It influences leadership and management processes and, most importantly, the performance of employees towards achieving desired goals and objectives of an organization. Therefore, a positive and accountable organizational culture will help improve patients’ outcomes and satisfaction. Therefore, healthcare organizations must maintain a positive working and accountable organizational culture by ensuring employees understand their roles and responsibilities towards the organization, each other, and their patients.     

References

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Koven, S. G. (2019). Checks on Bureaucracy, Organizational Accountability, and Organizational Culture. In The Case Against Bureaucratic Discretion (pp. 67-100). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Lee, T. D., Park, H., & Lee, J. (2019). Collaborative accountability for sustainable public health: A Korean perspective on the effective use of ICT-based health risk communication. Government information quarterly, 36(2), 226-236.

Lewis, V. A., D’Aunno, T., Murray, G. F., Shortell, S. M., & Colla, C. H. (2018). The hidden roles that management partners play in accountable care organizations. Health Affairs, 37(2), 292-298.

Lewis, V. A., Tierney, K. I., Fraze, T., & Murray, G. F. (2019). Care transformation strategies and approaches of accountable care organizations. Medical Care Research and Review, 76(3), 291-314.

Liu, J. (2019). Investigations on the Institutions for Ecological Development with Checks and Balances. In Chinese Dream and Practice in Zhejiang–Ecology (pp. 231-264). Springer, Singapore.

Nathan, H., Thumma, J. R., Ryan, A. M., & Dimick, J. B. (2019). Early impact of Medicare accountable care organizations on inpatient surgical spending. Annals of surgery, 269(2), 191.

Shanafelt, T., Trockel, M., Ripp, J., Murphy, M. L., Sandborg, C., & Bohman, B. (2019). Building a program on well-being: key design considerations to meet the unique needs of each organization. Academic Medicine, 94(2), 156-161.