Accountability and the Healthcare Industry Accountability is absolutely crucial when it comes to the health care industry. The professional health care industry has an obligation to create an atmosphere of responsibility and obligation with strong ethical values and where these values are clearly enforced. One of the reasons why this is so absolutely crucial is because the stakes are so high in health care: clinicians deal with the high stakes of life and death each day. "Accountability encompasses the procedures and processes by which one party justifies and takes responsibility for its activities such as for achieving various organizational goals" (O'Hagan, 2009). Accountability creates a culture which can thus be focused on things like evidence-based practice and on a steady improvement of health and quality services because the atmosphere values and rewards things like these and is structured in such a way that it is demanded by the collective and individual performance. No health care facility should rest on its laurels, assuming that it has achieved the highest standards in health care improvements. "The ultimate goal of creating a culture of accountability is to create a continuously learning organization. A continuously learning organization promotes the acquisition and use of new knowledge as a strategy for coping with change and also recognizes the critical need to empower workforces to learn and participate in continuous improvement" (O'Hagan, 2009).

Any health care facility or agency which is truly devoted to an atmosphere and system of accountability will have methods in place in order to measure the level of accountability of each employee and to ensure that employees are meeting these standards. Any professional healthcare facility needs to work like a well-oiled machine or a tight ship; this simply isn't possible with a lack of employee accountability. "Physician business owners are experts at exercising proper bedside manner and often find themselves in a position of having to deliver life changing information to their patients" (Lion, 2012). However, in spite of the challenges they straddle...

A lack of employee accountability not only undermines profits and productivity, but sets a standard for a low level of quality of care. Thus, there need to be systems in place for measuring employee accountability, such as things like the average wait time for a patient to be seen, patient satisfaction and feedback surveys, along with compiling patient demographics and recording information about benefits.
Once you've set forth a clear measuring stick for your employees, it's important to help them set achievable goals. Furthermore, the employer should take the time to help them understand the importance and benefit of the work they do and explain how they should communicate about finished projects or immediate issues (Lion, 2012). Finally, some sort of employee performance review needs to occur so that there's documentation of all accountability (Lion, 2012).

The failure to see how accountability is directly connected with ethical considerations in both safety and leadership, not to mention overall management is a failure of many healthcare organizations. Ethics and accountability are inextricably interlocked. Without accountability, many ethical standards can too easily fall by the wayside, and ultimately undermine the effectiveness of leadership and the organization and cohesion of management. Ethical accountability is a nuanced concept that needs to be expanded upon in the minds of many clinicians so that they better understand the consequences of their behavior and can engage in self-empowerment to act accordingly (Benjamin, 2003). "Not all ethical breaches are gross violations of conduct.…