Restorative Just Culture - So What?: A Manifesto for Organizations

A restorative just culture has become a core aspiration for many organizations in healthcare and elsewhere. Whereas ’just culture’ is the topic of some residual conceptual debate (e.g. retributive policies organized around rules, violations and consequences are ’sold’ as just culture), the evidence base on, and business case for, restorative practice has been growing and is generating increasing, global interest. In the wake of an incident, restorative practices ask who are impacted, what their needs are and whose obligation it is to meet those needs. Restorative practices aim to involve participants from the entire community in the resolution and repair of harms.

This book offers organization leaders and stakeholders a practical guide to the experiences of implementing
and evaluating restorative practices and creating a sustainable just, restorative culture. It contains the perspectives from leaders, theoreticians regulators, employees and patient representatives. To the best of our knowledge, there is no book on the market today that can function as a guide for the implementation and evaluation of a just and learning culture and restorative practices. This book is intended to fill this gap. This book will provide, among other topics, an overview of restorative just culture principles and practices; a balanced treatment of the various implementations and evaluations of just culture and restorative processes; a guide for leaders about what to stop, start, increase and decrease in their own organizations; and an attentive to philosophical and historical traditions and assumptions that underlie just culture and restorative approaches.

The interest in ’just culture’, not just in healthcare but also in other fields of safety-critical practice, has been steadily growing over the past decade. It is a trending area. In this, it has become clear that 20-year-old retributive models not only hinder the acceleration of performance and organizational improvement but have also in some cases become a blunt HR instrument, an expression of power over justice and a way to stifle honesty, reporting and learning. What is new in this, then, is the restorative angle on just culture, as it has been developed over the last few years and now is practised and applied to HR, suicide prevention, healthcareimprovement, regulatory innovations and other areas.

Sidney Dekker (PhD Ohio State University, USA, 1996) is Professor and Director of the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and Professor at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University in the Netherlands. Sidney has lived and worked in seven countries across four continents and won worldwide acclaim for his groundbreaking work in human factors and safety. He coined the term ’Safety Differently’ in 2012, which has since turned into a global movement for change. It encourages organizations to declutter their bureaucracy and set people free to make things go well, and to offer compassion, restoration and learning when they don’t. An avid pilot of planes large and small, he has been flying the Boeing 737 as airline pilot on the side. Sidney is bestselling author of, most recently: Foundations of Safety Science; The Safety Anarchist; The End of Heaven; Just Culture; Safety Differently; The Field Guide to Understanding ’Human Error’; Second Victim; Drift into Failure; and Patient Safety. He has directed the documentaries ’Safety Differently, ’ 2017; ’Just Culture, ’ 2018, ’The Complexity of Failure, ’ 2018, and ’Doing Safety Differently, ’ 2019. His work has over 12,200 citations and an h-index of 47. More at sidneydekker.com.

Amanda Oates is a highly experienced, dynamic and motivated HR Director with experience gained within both public and private sectors across the full spectrum of HR and OD. An individual who possesses sound technical knowledge, excellent communication skills while dealing with complex organizational change or extremely sensitive issues. She is an articulate, credible professional with a solid reputation. She’s a high achiever who can demonstrate that she can adapt, find solutions and deliver results in a constantly changing and political environment. She is currently the Executive Director of Workforce, Mersey Care NHS FT where she has executive responsibility for the Workforce including strategic, advisory and transactional services for HR, Learning and Development, Education, Organizational Effectiveness, Leadership, Occupational Health and Well-being Service, Succession Planning and Compensation and Benefits.

Joe Rafferty BSc, PhD, CBE is the Chief Executive for Mersey Care NHS FT. He’s an accomplished leader able to balance innovation and pragmatism, combining the capability to anticipate the implications of an intricate policy agenda with the ability to understand and be sensitive to the concerns they can raise from a range of individual and cultural perspectives. An inclusive and constructive thinker, with senior experience in primary research and organizational change, who welcomes challenges, deals with obstacles and recognizes the need for change to add value from both a patient, clinical, research and a public perspective. Mr. Raffery is a strong strategic leader, motivator and team builder with the capability to generate original ideas that constructively shape the behavior of the NHS system and beyond, while never losing sight of the important day to day objectives of the organization. A tactful but firm decision-maker with a very successful track record of delivering large scale, sustainable changes to healthcare delivery.