Developing a tool for cultural accreditation (Shafi project) in hospitals of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences

Organizational culture affects the values, traditions, and norms of an organization. Therefore, the organizational behavior means how much an organization acts ethically. The cultural environment affects the formation of the organizational climate and, behavior. There are some deficiencies in the standards of organizational culture. This study aimed to review different aspects to accredit hospitals culturally in Shiraz University of Medical Sciences and consisted of two stages: First; the initial qualitative study was done by interviewing the experts who were selected purposely and held focused group discussion sessions to recognize the different aspects of cultural validation and develop an cultural accreditation manual for hospitals. Second stage was an evaluation of the hospitals in Shiraz University of Medical Sciences according to the cultural accreditation manual. Among 17 targeted hospitals, passed the training course of identifying indicators and volunteered to participate in the survey, 11 hospitals which had performed self-evaluation according to their manuals entered the survey. Seven main subjects and 17 sub-titles were derived from the first qualitative study. The subjects included considering religious laws demanded by patients and those patients’ accompaniers, patient satisfaction, staff satisfaction, consideration of ethical rules, dress codes, cultural activities of the hospital, and environmental neatness of the hospital. The evaluation of the above factors ranged from 0-1. The hospitals, total scores were from 0.68 to 0.78. Findings suggest capability of the indicators for hospital cultural evaluation. The qualitative study ranked the hospitals in every aspect.