Effects of unification on medical staff culture

Unsurprisingly, integrating medical staffs across multiple hospitals in a system has numerous effects on the culture within each individual medical staff, although these effects tend to be overwhelmingly positive.

When medical staffs are unified correctly, each staff can still maintain its local culture. In fact, Todd Sagin, MD, JD, president and medical director of Sagin Healthcare Consulting, says, “If the local culture is a valuable one, then unification should not be an occasion to dilute its contribution.”

However, where a medical staff’s culture could use improvement, unification is often a good option. Unification not only fosters more standardization across a health system, but  “it has the ability to generate a stronger cadre of physician leaders for the combined staff entity, who can then work with colleagues to improve the problematic culture,” Sagin adds. “This is because there is a greater bench strength of potential physician leaders in a unified staff than in any single hospital.”

Maintaining a positive medical staff culture across all individual medical staffs is important both for standardizing quality of care and for maintaining satisfaction among medical staff members.

Ultimately, the end goal of a unified medical staff in terms of culture should be to “spread the adoption of best practices and standardization where that brings value and preserve the attributes of local culture that deliver value,” explains Sagin.

In other words, preserve what is beneficial and what works, remove what doesn’t, and take advice from local medical staffs to fix what may be broken.