The importance of accountability in the health care industry

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 with patients, when it comes to their team members, they sometimes resort to just hoping for the best, a recipe for failure.

It's important to be able to look out for classic signs of poor staff accountability: "They consist of patient complaints, high employee turnover, frequent absentism, office staff conflict, getting to work late, texting, stealing time and, ultimately, interruptions in your day due to poor office and front desk management" (Lion, 2012). 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. Many unethical behaviors are subtle; practitioners may inadvertently act unethically because they have not considered the relevant issues" (Benjamin, 2003). The fundamental purpose of ethics is to help act as a beacon to encourage the best behavior which makes the welfare of clients the first and fundamental priority (Benjamin, 2003). Being ethical is not simply about being aware of all the ethical codes; nor is being accountable about knowing all the rules and regulations. Both values truly orbit around the ability and the priority of bringing the highest level of quality and value to the work being done and the issues at hand that require time and attention.

Leadership can come strongly into play, because leaders need to engage in and have mastery of a higher level of ethical concepts. For instance, leaders need to understand and implement things known as preventative ethics. "Mastery of concepts and skills from the discipline of ethics that are designed to anticipate and prevent conflicts among ethical obligations before these conflicts arise and to manage ethical conflicts effectively when they nonetheless occur (with lower frequency)" (McCullough, 2011). Real leadership and a solid grasp of preventative ethics will be able to avoid a range of complications and adverse events for patients.

Yet another function which contributes to a successful organizations is the system of checks and balances. Checks and balances looks like a range of factors at play with a given organization: all of these factors and outside agencies work to hold the organization to a higher level of accountability. For example, organizations like JCAHO, CMS, public sources for hospital certification information and comparable bodies are all part of the greater scheme of checks and balances. These agencies set certain standards of quality in order for certification in the field and the hospitals have to meet these standards as well as show evidence that the standards have been met.