Project Title:
Research project: Management practices and cultural manifestation on Brazilian and Portuguese Hospitals

Start and End of Project:
August 2013 - ongoing

Chief Investigator:
Eda Castro Lucas de Souza

Funding Entity:
CAPES / Ministério da Educação / Brazil

Research Team:

Partners

Summary:

Health organizations have several roles and implementing their organizational practices is a big challenge because there are different cultural manifestations from many professional groups, which domain specific expertise working together to reach organizational objectives. Taking into account this complex map and the fact that there is little research upon health management systems under the cultural perspective, the objective of this research is to identify cultural manifestations of hospitals through organizational practices and the relationship of those practices with organizational performance. The research justifies due to the relevance of discussing cultural manifestations on health organizations and the role of management practices to push the performance of health services supplied to citizenships. In this sense the research can create new knowledge and subsidy the building of policies and management practices of organizations researched. The assumption of the study is that management practices represent cultural manifestations, to be identified from professional perceptions upon organizational practices, taking into account the following dimensions: sense of duty, hierarchical relations, perception of control, responsibility definition, sanctions, cooperation quality, regulation. In Portugal the research will be undertaken on Health Units that belong to each one of the five Regional Health Coordination (Administrações Regionais de Saúde - ARS) that represent all Portuguese ARS. The sample is formed by hospitals from the following regions/cities: Vila Real, Cova da Beira, Coimbra, Alentejo, Algarve and Lisbon. In Lisbon will be researched Santa Maria Hospital and Garcia da Horta Hospital.

The data will be collected as following:

I – Document analysis, in order to describes organizational history;
II – Semi-structured interviews with hospitals managers, to identify the main management practices;
III – Online survey with hospitals staffs through Cultural Manifestation Scale (CMS) built and validated according to research techniques applied to this kind of scale.

The length of time of each interview is around 40 minutes and the length of time to fill in the scale is approximately 15 minutes. The research has been undertaken under the umbrella of a scientific agreement amongst the Management Graduate Programme of the University of Brasilia, Brazil and the Social and Political Sciences Institute of the Lisbon University, and is part of a post doc internship of the research coordinator, Eda Castro Lucas de Souza, and there are no costs for the organizations to be researched.