Healthy Workplaces: The Case for Shared Clinical Decision Making and Increased Full-Time Employment

Abstract

Today, healthy work environments are recognized as essential to attain positive experiences and optimal clinical outcomes for patients, the well-being of healthcare providers and organizational effectiveness. Creating such environments is both a collective and an individual responsibility. It requires each of us to move away from the rhetoric, abandon our comfort zones and territorialities, adopt new evidence, and fully embrace the collective good. This commentary builds on the two excellent papers on this issue (Shamian and El-Jardali, and Clements, Dault and Priest), and adds two new necessary elements to build healthy workplaces and productive teamwork. The first is shared clinical decision making, the most substantive form of teamwork, and a necessary condition to build healthy work environments and deliver optimal patient care. The second is employment status: we cannot achieve healthy work environments and optimal teamwork with overreliance on part-time, casual or agency employment. The key premise for Ontario's 70% full-time employment policy is based on the fact that such a percentage is a necessary, minimal condition to ensure continuity of care and caregiver for patients, and continuity of relationships for our teams.