by Sondra Badolamenti, Professor at UniCamillus
Work and Organizational Psycholgy studies the behavior of people in the workplace and in the performance of their professional activity in relation to the interpersonal relationships they have with other colleagues, the tasks to be performed, the rules and functioning of the organization for which they work.
The current challenges of the health system are numerous and growing. On the one hand, it is pressured by the need to respond with quality services to an increasingly elderly population, characterized by an exponential increase in chronic conditions, through the presence of health professionals who have the necessary skills to manage the increasing complexity of care.
On the other hand, the health system itself has to deal with the scarcity of resources (nursing shortage, lack of contract renewals, lack of turnover in the nursing population, etc.) which require policies to rationalize spending and reorganize the care system through the growing territorialization.
Sondra Badolamenti teaches Work and Organizational Psychology in the Degree Course in Physiotherapy and in the 1st level Master in Management for coordination functions in the Health Professions at UniCamillus.
In particular, the teaching within the Master promotes the acquisition of the knowledge concerning the different healthcare organizations. Today, in fact, a nursing coordinator is no longer expected to schedule the shifts of the staff of his/her department.
He/she is a key figure involved in the planning, management and performance evaluation of his staff, in order to improve their skills and, at the same time, the quality of assistance. It therefore deals with the analysis of staff training needs, the promotion and enhancement of their skills and the analysis of healthcare outcomes. As coordinator, he designs and manages the application of assistance models suitable for technical-scientific evolution aimed at constantly improving the quality of the services provided.
The nursing coordinator also promotes the organizational well-being of employees within their team, knowing the mechanisms for identifying and managing stress in staff, aware of how much interpersonal conflicts negatively impact the quality of healthcare and the healthcare outcomes themselves; in collaboration with other health managers, it also plans and manages the allocation of resources in relation to the planning of assistance.
In summary, he/she learns how to respond to the complexity of these requests by integrating in a functional way, in the practice of his/her leadership, the more purely technical skills with the more purely relational ones.