Assessment of organizational well-being in an Italian General Hospital after an organizational change

Abstract

Nowadays, the intensity of care organizational model has been adopted in several Italian hospitals in order to create specific areas dedicated to patients reporting homogeneous needs of care. The present paper aims at describing the organizational intervention Inside the change, designed to explore the context and assess the impact of the implementation of the Intensity of cure model in an Italian hospital. Inside the change was composed of two segments: i) the evaluation of attitudes toward change and workers’ well-being (quantitative phase); ii) the conduction of a consulting process aimed to identify critical issues and the related improvement actions (qualitative phase). The results showed that workers (i.e., physicians, nurses, healthcare assistants) involved in the change process showed higher levels of work-related well-being symptoms. In line with this result, the second stage of the intervention had the goal of improving workers’ involvement in organizational change, together with the identification of suitable improvement actions. Data collected one year after the intervention suggest that the whole performance of healthcare organizations may be enhanced by investments in monitoring and improving organizational processes, particularly for those focused on HR management.

Keywords

• Intensity of care
• organizational change
• health system
• organizational well-being.