Organizational Learning in Health Care Organizations

Savithiri Ratnapalan,Elizabeth Uleryk

doi:10.3390/systems2010024

Abstract

The process of collective education in an organization that has the capacity to impact an organization’s operations, performance and outcomes is called organizational learning. In health care organizations, patient care is provided through one or more visible and invisible teams. These teams are composed of experts and novices from diverse backgrounds working together to provide coordinated care. The number of teams involved in providing care and the possibility of breakdowns in communication and coordinated care increases in direct proportion to sophisticated technology and treatment strategies of complex disease processes. Safe patient care is facilitated by individual professional learning; inter-professional team learning and system based organizational learning, which encompass modified context specific learning by multiple teams and team members in a health care organization. Organizational learning in health care systems is central to managing the learning requirements in complex interconnected dynamic systems where all have to know common background knowledge along with shared meta-knowledge of roles and responsibilities to execute their assigned functions, communicate and transfer the flow of pertinent information and collectively provide safe patient care. Organizational learning in health care is not a onetime intervention, but a continuing organizational phenomenon that occurs through formal and informal learning which has reciprocal association with organizational change. As such, organizational changes elicit organizational learning and organizational learning implements new knowledge and practices to create organizational changes.

Highlights

The process of collective education in an organization that has the capacity to impact an organization’s operations, performance and outcomes is called organizational learning
It is described as a process of increasing organizational effectiveness and efficiency through shared knowledge and understanding [6], which is a system-level phenomenon that stays in the organization regardless of the changes in health care teams or team members [2,7]
Organizational learning can be viewed as a modified context specific learning by multiple teams and team members to translate knowledge to action and to evaluate those actions to create shared knowledge within an organization/institution

Summary

Introduction

―A health system consists of all organizations, people and actions whose primary intent is to promote, restore or maintain health‖ according to the World Health Organization WHO [1]. It is said to be the cumulative product of the learning of small groups or teams [3]; and the collective learning that occurs in an organization that has the capacity to impact an organization’s performance [4,5] It is described as a process of increasing organizational effectiveness and efficiency through shared knowledge and understanding [6], which is a system-level phenomenon that stays in the organization regardless of the changes in health care teams or team members [2,7]. There is no explicit mandate to engage in continuing education for the support or administrative staff in healthcare institutions many organizations provide and expect ongoing professional development to improve efficiency at an individual level or local level. Identifying and including all diverse groups involved in the delivery of services in reducing waste and improving efficiency of the system using the ―Lean methodology‖ been shown to increase efficiency and safety in healthcare institutions [12]

Teams within a Health Care Organization

Organizational Memory

The Process of Organizational Learning

Leadership in Organizational Learning

Findings

Conclusion