Organizational Climate & Culture
TCOM is a framework for addressing quality, outcomes, and safety. Other safety critical settings such as aviation and healthcare recognize that safety must be part of improvement efforts with safety as a goal for those we help and for the professionals in the system. Our approach uses three inter-related TCOM strategies to focus improvement efforts, align priorities, and improve outcomes: Systems-theoretical incident reviews, organizational assessment and tools for teams.
Systems-theoretical Incident Reviews: The Safe Systems improvement Tool (SSIT) is a multi-purpose information integration tool designed to be the output of an analysis process. The SSIT is effective for use in critical incident reviews (e.g., child fatalities, child near fatalities) but may be used more broadly to understand systemic influences to other outcomes (e.g., youth in foster care being trafficked, children experiencing a long-length of stay in care, maltreatment recurrence). The SSIT provides structure to the output of a review process, organizes the reviewers’ learnings, and shares the “system’s story” of a critical incident.
Organizational Assessment: The Safety Culture Survey is an organizational assessment that assesses various aspects of safety culture in a child welfare jurisdiction. Many child welfare agencies implement this survey as a part of their internal continuous quality improvement efforts to better understand employees’ perceptions of safety culture within the agency and to track how these organizational metrics change over time.
Tools for teams: A field guide is a reference book that helps users learn by providing them with real examples from “the field.” Praed’s TeamFirst Field Guide is designed as a reference for safe, reliable and more effective teamwork. The Field Guide provides specific team-based strategies and tactics that work and are illustrated with some real-life examples of implementations in the field. Examples of the types of tools we may suggest are team huddles, structured debriefings, use of standardized communications tools, tools for team and self-regulation, and tools for managing hard conversations. These basic team-based skills support the important practice of mindful organizing seen in other safety critical settings.