workforce
workforce
Ending toxic workplace culture
The Ethos program aims to foster safe, respectful, professional behaviour in healthcare.
Victoria Atkinson interviewed by Dallas Bastian
Health professionals consistently list bullying, discrimination and harassment as key issues in the workplace. Now, Australia’ s largest not-for-profit health and aged care provider plans to tackle the problem head-on.
St Vincent’ s Health Australia is partnering with the Australian Institute of Health Innovation at Macquarie University to assess its approach to addressing entrenched cultural problems in the health sector.
Using a National Health and Medical Research Council partnership grant of $ 1.2 million, the team will evaluate the provider’ s Ethos program, which aims to foster safe, respectful and professional behaviour, and to provide a consistent, transparent and equitable way to address staff conduct that undermines patient or staff wellbeing.
First introduced at St Vincent’ s Hospital in Melbourne in July this year, the program is currently being rolled out across all of the provider’ s Australian hospitals.
Dr Victoria Atkinson, chief medical officer and group general manager of clinical governance at St Vincent’ s Health, said the evaluation will explore staff behaviour and patient experience.
“ It’ s well known that bullying, discrimination and harassment are significant problems in Australia’ s healthcare sector, and St Vincent’ s Health is not immune,” Atkinson said.
“ Sometimes staff may feel ill-equipped or unable to speak up when they witness or experience disrespectful behaviour. They might feel that if they report the problem, it won’ t be addressed; or perhaps they’ re afraid of repercussions. Or maybe it’ s just because – in the unit or department they work – there’ s an acceptance that inappropriate behaviour is somehow normal.”
Atkinson said Ethos has been designed to overcome these barriers and contribute to making staff and patients feel welcome, valued and safe.
The Ethos program includes:
• an accountability pathway that outlines a consistent, transparent and equitable way to provide feedback to staff about their behaviour
• a reporting tool for either negative behaviour that undermines staff or patient safety, or positive behaviour( reports can be submitted by any staff member using an online tool which is private and confidential)
• a package of capability building and training to equip leaders and staff with the skills to role model safe and respectful behaviour.
Nursing Review spoke to Atkinson about the Ethos program, its usage and its evaluation.
NR: Can you run through the Ethos program’ s online tool? VA: What that tool does is collect positive reports on people’ s behaviour that we want to encourage. We want to use that in a meaningful way because we haven’ t been great at rewarding people, either through leadership promotion, recruitment or even just acknowledging those positive behaviours. But you can also put in observations that have happened to you or someone else in a negative way.
What the tool then does is pull through the system and look for a pattern. If I’ m reporting someone, it will look to see how many reports that person has had against them, and that’ s because the pattern of those behaviours is almost as important as the content. That is, people who have these minor infractions along the way, and they’ re just unpleasant or they make inappropriate comments, and it’ s at low levels, we know that if there are enough of them, there’ s a real pattern of them, that they are the people most likely to go on to do something more major, or something that impacts on patient safety. So we’ re looking for the pattern of behaviour. Those reports that are pulled through the system go to a trained triage team, which is a few core clinicians that will look at those reports, contextualise them, and place them onto our accountability framework, which has both informal and formal mechanisms of dealing with them.
The program also takes staff and leaders through relevant training. What does that home in on? There’ s a number of different roles in the program. First of all,
18 | nursingreview. com. au