In healthcare firms, accountability is extremely vital. An absence of accountability in healthcare systems can result in tremendous damage to the corporation. Additionally, it can diminish the effectiveness of wellness, damage a corporation’s status, and even elevate the risks of complaints. For this reason, the culture of accountability strengthens doctor-patient ties, reduces wastes on resources, and assists companies offer good quality care. Generally, healthcare firms gauge the financial and performance accountability of workers as well as the leaders being responsible for inspiring their subordinates to be accountable for their own ethical conduct. Therefore, accountability ensures that all workers are responsible for their own actions, decisions, and performances, keeps the checks and balances regarding finances in order, and, lastly, it keeps a positive working culture as all workers feel engaged and productive (Chambers, 2017).
The Importance of Accountability in Healthcare
To enumerate, an absence of accountability can create severe challenges in health sectors, and there are numerous reasons why it is important. First, the culture of accountability can assist avoid mistakes such as reducing risks of complaints, maintaining the health care status, and prevent putting patient’s lives at risk. Healthcare accountability offers its team with clear guidelines, policies, and methods, and they can learn from their mistakes and improve on operations. Secondly, healthcare accountability is the only method of enhancing task incentives, thereby making the sector’s policies approachable and operative. Lastly, accountability in health care firms has popularly been known to have a vigorous influence on decision-making. For instance, this has been evidenced in the research of societal cognition, corporation dynamics, and human associations (Chambers, 2017).
Measuring Employee Accountability
Worker accountability is gauged cautiously in healthcare firms. Employee accountability is vital in healthcare because it improves enactments, boosts worker involvement, elevates staff morale, and generates a workplace norm of numerous improvements. Nonetheless, it can be measured using various approaches, that is, generating realistic SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) objectives and gauging outcomes. This approach is significant as it gives workers a clear guideline of their objectives and motivates them to work harder (Baird et al., 2019).
Also, employee accountability can be gauged by setting up a performance metric to measure how well the staff is doing their tasks. The performance metric offers statistics that can be used to develop benchmarks that workers need to reach, thus motivating their own performances. Finally, another approach to gauge employee accountability is the use of worker engagement surveys. The engagement surveys offer a greater substitute to the yearly enactments reviews as they are more modified and offer deeper insights. Besides, they help executives be aware of the worker’s feelings towards healthcare accountability (Baird et al., 2019).
Accountability and Ethical Considerations
It is imperative to ensure that every staff member in the health care corporation is accountable, which also applies to leadership and management. Typically, top leaders and supervisors are not only answerable for their own responsibilities but also, they are answerable for the accountabilities of their workers. Precisely, management and leaders routinely have the most difficult task when it comes to accountability as they have to ensure that everything has been conducted ethically and according to the corporation’s criteria before continuing. Considerably, being accountable implies being within ethical standards. For this reason, in case there are issues with being ethical in leadership, then there should be a panel of executives organized to make a decision on the judgment of how ethical or how unethical the issue has been.
Checks and Balances in an Organization
Furthermore, the healthcare firms have checks and balances which assist to keep funds organized from being too authoritative. Moreover, usually ensure that no other individual or department has total control over making decisions, vividly describing roles, and force the whole workforce to complete tasks. The managerial discretion restricts the legislative checks and balances. Thus, the Political Budget Cycles (PBC) checks and balances via the jurisdictive have a higher compliance within the policies. Additionally, the check and balances are more effective, and it illustrates why the PBC cycles may be weaker in democratic countries. (Holcombe, 2018).
In the end, the government guarantees the requirements of the community are met, the consumer makes sure that the provider is offering sufficient amenities for the total being charged, and that providers ensure that there is a precise service that assists payers pay for their expenses. As a result, the check and balance at work will offer a prosperous healthcare environment (Holcombe, 2018).
Accountability and Working Culture
Working culture is effective when corporations have sufficient accountabilities that is, customers (patients) will have faith in the healthcare firm to an extent of referring their families, and friends when they acquire incomparable services. A good illustration of workplace accountability culture is when bosses trust their workers to bring their best work for the corporation so that it is engrained in day-to-day work life. Accountability positively affects the workplace cultures because all workers are accountable for their own activities, conducts, enactments, and decision makings. Accountability develops an elevation of commitment to work and employee morale as a workplace culture, which ends up creating higher performances in the healthcare firm. Consequently, the greatest quantities of responsibilities and accountabilities for just culture remains with the corporation’s leaders, and usually, the company culture is most strongly-minded by the precise priorities of leaderships (Buffet, 2020).
Positive Working Culture and Avoiding Blame
If bosses keep their workers contented, then they will have a positive working culture towards the healthcare industry. Workers will be contented to work for a corporation that offers rewards, advances, incentives and even respects them together with their perspectives. These types of motivations will encourage workers, and offer them with a positive sense of security, and avoid a working culture of blame. However, if workers are not confident in their bosses, a poor working and unethical environment will be developed. Workers may end up hating on the management and opt for employment in other firms (Buffet, 2020).
Conclusion
Accountability is a significant field in healthcare firms as it involves the activities of not only reducing but also taking accountability for actions taking place in the corporation. It is vital because it gauges how funds are handled as they directly impact how a patient is treated or the quality of care he/she will get. Also, accountability is essential as it has a strong authority on how leaders and workers can make decisions, and it illustrates how employee accountability can be gauged using various methods. Lastly, healthcare accountability also influences the corporations working cultures in order to avoid blames.
References
Baird, K. M., Tung, A., & Yu, Y. (2019). Employee organizational commitment and hospital performance. Health care management review, 44(3), 206-215.
Buffett, W. (2020). Culture: The Why of Accountability. The Right Way to Win: Making Business Ethics Work in the Real World, 167.
Chambers, N. (2017). Governance and accountability in healthcare. EBOOK: Healthcare Management, 347.
Holcombe, R. G. (2018). Checks and balances: Enforcing constitutional constraints. Economies, 6(4), 57.
