Connecting Healthcare Worker Well-being, Patient Safety and Organisational Change : The Triple Challenge

This volume delineates the ways in which key areas of healthcare, well-being, patient safety and organisational change overlap with and contribute to unhealthy workplaces for healthcare professionals. There is a growing realisation within healthcare that healthcare worker well-being, patient outcomes and organisational change are symbiotically linked. Burnout and stress in healthcare workers and toxic organisational cultures can lead to a cycle of patient neglect, medical errors, sub-optimal care and further stress. This topical volume therefore outlines the ways in which worker well-being, patient outcomes and organisational change can be aligned to contribute to a healthy workplace and therefore better medical care. The volume includes an array of authors from different disciplines including primary care, clinical medicine, psychology, sociology, management, clinical governance, health policy and health services research. It succeeds in integrating different voices and reaches meaningful conclusions to address the challenges facing the healthcare workforce.

Anthony Montgomery, PhD, is a full professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece. His expertise covers burnout, human factors and patient safety within healthcare. He has been involved (either as a Principal Investigator or collaborator) in attracting research funding to the value of 2,912,900 Euros. His research has contributed to: the benchmarking of burnout among healthcare professionals, developing a new measure to assess the patient perspective of quality of care, and action research interventions aimed at organizational change. Furthermore, he is examining the issue of employee in silence in healthcare, and developing mentoring solutions that address both performance and wellbeing.

Efharis Panagopoulou, PhD, is an associate professor of health psychology at the Medical School of Aristotle University in Greece. After completing her doctoral thesis in Leiden University, The Netherlands, she joined the Medical School in 2002 with a European fellowship aimed at attracting research leaders from abroad. To date, she has coordinated several projects in the field of stress, diagnostic mistakes, and clinical decision making. Dr. Panagopoulou is the Principal Investigator of the ORCAB project:“Organisational culture, professional burnout and quality of health care” (7th Research Framework, European Union.) The project involved 10 partners from 9 European countries and the funding budget was 2.1 million Euros. Dr. Panagopoulou was the Head of the Scientific Committee for the EHPS conference in Crete (2011). From April-May 2012 she received a Fulbright scholarship to study the impact of information concealment on couples coping with cancer. She is currently the coordinator of the communication skills training program for medical doctors, and of the Personal and Professional Development program for members of the medical school. Her current research is focused on the role of emotions on clinical decision making and medical errors.

Margot van der Doef, PhD, is an assistant professor (Occupational) Health Psychology at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Ever since her PhD, her focus in research and teaching has been on employee health and wellbeing. Her research includes studies on the impact of psychosocial job conditions on employee health and well-being, with a strong emphasis on health care and educational contexts, and more recently on chronically ill employees. Furthermore, she has carried out and is currently conducting projects involving the development, implementation, and evaluation of individual- and organisational focused interventions to reduce psychosocial risks and enhance employee wellbeing. At the Institute of Psychology of Leiden University, she is coordinator and teacher of the master specialisation Occupational Health Psychology.

Michael P. Leiter, PhD, is an organizational psychologist interested in the relationships of people with their work. He has held the Canada Research Chair in Occupational Health and served as Professor of Organizational Psychology at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada and at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia. His research is focused on civility, respect and work engagement. Prof. Leiter has designed workplace interventions in the area of civility and respect that have been shown to have a lasting impact, bringing about improvements in job satisfaction, organizational commitment, trust and burnout. Together with co-author Dr. Christina Maslach, he has coined the term "work engagement" as the antithesis to burnout. He consults on research and workplace interventions from Nova Scotia.