Diagnosing culture in health‐care organizations using critical incidents Available to Purchase

The critical incident technique (CIT) provides a means to produce rich cultural information from organizational members in an effort to describe the organization’s culture. Very few published studies have used CIT to diagnose culture. In combination with other methods, CIT can be an integral element of a larger study of an organization’s culture. In this study, CIT was used in a US acute care hospital that had recently occupied a new $181 million replacement hospital having an emphasis on patient‐centered care and a healing environment. Individual CIT “stories” supplied rich detail about the hospital’s culture, providing opportunities to communicate how people behave with respect to the culture. Consequently, CIT results provide specific information on what people do that supports the culture and what they do that works against the culture.