Page 70 - NATIONAL POLICY QUALITY IN HEALTHCARE: Bridging Silos, Accelerating Improvements 2022-2026

National Policy for Quality in Healthcare
Bridging Silos, Accelerating Improvements

3.7.3 Internalising Quality Culture

Quality culture should be at the heart of high performing organisations. At all levels of the
health system, quality culture can be understood as, an inherent and explicit recognition
of the value of efforts to improve the quality of care provided, and such efforts are
systematically promoted within an enabling environment that encourages engagement,
dialogue, openness and accountability (4). Quality culture affects the way people and
groups interact with each other, with clients, and with stakeholders. These relational
aspects of human interactions within the system are critical to consider when nurturing
a culture of quality. Indeed, a strong quality culture, with compassion as a core attribute,
is integral to long-term organisational sustainability and success, where the people in
the organisation must hold to common values that can drive quality-related efforts at all
levels of the system. In our context, the MOH Corporate Culture consisting the elements of
“Caring, Professionalism and Teamwork” is an essential feature of quality culture, which
needs to be embraced and translated into daily practice.

The mindset and awareness to embrace quality culture should ideally be incorporated
as part of a mandatory set of components of the Training Curriculum for MOH staff at
all levels, from the entry-level (new entrants to the MOH system - University, colleges,
pre-employment, orientation for new staff) to all other levels such as in-service training
[Refer Policy Statement 5: Building effective capacity and capability for Quality]. The
use of various modes of media to publicise or increase awareness of the elements of this
corporate culture should be made.

It is also important to ensure due recognition and incentives are in place for everyone who
is involved in QI to keep the motivation high. Appropriate reward and recognition will help
to foster and ensure sustainability of the quality culture on top of continuous organisation-
wide learning.

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