In the work environment, nurses often face barriers to the patients ’safety and the services’ quality that are truly hard to overcome. Farokhzadian et al. (2018) performed the study that helped them to uncover the most widespread challenges nurses face that impede the creation of a safe patient environment, and may cause additional health risks, including the raised mortality rates. For instance, these are the barriers caused by the organizational culture like incompetent organizational infrastructure, insufficient leadership effectiveness, inadequate efforts to keep up with international and national standards, and overshadowed values of team participation.
To be more precise, the poor infrastructure obstacles may include the shortage of resources, weak professional competence of the staff, bad work atmosphere, and unsafe work environment. At the same time, poor leadership effectiveness features lack of commitment, non-supportive management, non-participatory decision-making (Farokhzadian et al., 2018). Then, the non-compliance with the standards can be presented by the failure to establish the clinical risk management systems, resistance to change, culture of blame and punishment, poor feedback to reported errors, bad educational efforts, low preventive culture.
The mentioned obstacles are usually present on the institutional level, and there is not much that the nurses can do to change the situation. However, sometimes, the adequately presented initiatives can have some effect on the higher management, and nurses can help in launching patient safety and improved patient care-oriented practices (Farokhzadian et al., 2018). Other ways to overcome the organizational culture barriers in communication with the higher managers and introducing the team meeting where the future changes can be discussed. In any case, overcoming the barriers should be persistent and involve the participation of all the medical personnel.
Reference
Farokhzadian, J., Nayeri, N. D., & Borhani, F. (2018). The long way ahead to achieve an effective patient safety culture: challenges perceived by nurses. BMC health services research, 18(1), 1-13. Web.