Nursing

Tips from BESD: Strategies to establish a just culture

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, May 28, 2010

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Just culture refers to a values-supportive model of shared accountability. It's a culture that holds organizations accountable for the systems they design and for how they respond to staff behaviors fairly and justly. In turn, staff members are accountable for the quality of their choices and for reporting both their errors and system vulnerabilities.

A just culture recognizes that individual practitioners should not be held accountable for system failings over which they have no control. A just culture also recognizes that many individual or active errors represent predictable interactions between human operators and the system in which they work. However, in contrast to a culture that touts no blame as its governing principle, a just culture does not tolerate conscious disregard of clear risks to patients or gross misconduct, such as falsifying a record, performing professional duties while intoxicated, etc.

Editor's note: This excerpt was adapted from the June 2010 issue of Briefings on Evidence-Based Staff Development. Discover all the benefits of subscribing to Briefings on Evidence-Based Staff Development.



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