The line of expertise 'Workforce Management and Outcome Research in Care' (WORC) brings together various research efforts to gain insight into the relationship between the behavior and collaboration of healthcare providers.
Vision
The fundamental purpose of WORC includes understanding and improving the organizational context of nursing and midwifery practices, demonstrating the connection between a balanced work environment and clinical excellence, evaluating and improving patient safety and healthcare quality concepts, and understanding and improving interprofessional collaboration and performance. WORC focuses on addressing numerous challenges in healthcare arising from ongoing societal and sectoral changes. These efforts are based on the development of theoretical frameworks, models, and systems related to the psychosocial well-being of healthcare providers and various patient outcomes, including clinical results, quality of care, and patient safety. This applies to both the individual level of healthcare providers, the (interdisciplinary) team, and the organizational context in which they work.
Objective
The ultimate goal is to promote excellent healthcare outcomes by creating a balanced work environment that integrates psychosocial and socio-technical elements, encourages innovation, and tackles challenges. Such an environment, focused on the patient and their family as partners, is central to WORC's research initiatives. WORC aims for ambitious objectives, including building a training and research network for workforce management interventions in healthcare organizations, developing strategies for implementing shared mental models in teams, promoting person-centered care practices, studying challenges at the individual, team, and organizational levels, and exploring the relationship between leadership characteristics and strategies and various outcomes in patient care, team functioning, and organizational performance.