Alberta Health Services Just Culture Philosophy

Alberta Health Services (AHS) initiated a focused effort to foster the development of a just culture in 2014. There are four key aspects of the AHS experience:

1. Just culture is a journey. It takes time and effort to continually educate, reinforce, and embed the just culture principles and practices within an organization.
2. All organizational policies should support a just culture. AHS uses the just culture guiding principles rather than a policy to ensure this happens.
3. To be successful, just culture requires a partnership between the organization’s patient safety, human resources, and operations teams.
4. The primary focus of just culture should be on how healthcare workers are treated when they are involved in a situation where something goes wrong.

Just Culture Guiding Principles document
The guiding principles are applied to all policies that are developed by the organization to ensure they support a just culture.

Just Culture Guiding Principles document

When Something Goes Wrong resources

Human Resources Advisors and physician leaders are trained and available to support managers and peers in applying a just culture approach when something goes wrong.

When Something Goes Wrong handout