Q&A with Roybal Retreat Keynote Speaker: Dr. Ingrid Nembhard

CHIBE spoke with the 2024 Roybal Retreat keynote speaker Ingrid Nembhard, PhD, MS, Fishman Family President’s Distinguished Professor, Professor of Health Care Management, and Professor of Management (Organizational Behavior) at Wharton, ahead of the retreat in Hershey, PA, on October 14-15.  

Dr. Nembhard will be speaking about “Moving from Innovation to Improvement” in her keynote.

Her research focuses on how characteristics of health care organizations, their leaders, and staff contribute to their ability to implement new practices, engage in continuous organizational learning, and ultimately improve quality of care. She studies leadership and psychological safety in teams, organizational learning from different types of experiences, the use of patient feedback via narratives to drive quality improvement by clinicians and administrators, the contributors to high performance in challenging work environments, and the implementation of care coordination in primary care groups, including the effects on patients and clinicians.

Could you tell us about the role of psychological safety in organizations?

In a nutshell, psychological safety is a foundation for workers’ well-being and organizational performance, especially in contexts where the people must work together to achieve collective, challenging goals amid complexity and uncertainty. Delivering patient care, improving patient care, and innovating in health care in general have become classic examples of settings where psychological safety is critical.

Psychological safety refers to the belief that the context is safe for interpersonal risk taking, that is, speaking up with your ideas, questions, concerns, mistakes, or critiques will be welcomed and valued, not punished.

What’s one thing you wish providers did more of to improve either patient care or improve the experience of the team members they work with?

Naming one thing is hard. I’ll go with welcome their ideas, listen to them, and respond appreciatively and constructively.

What are you trying to achieve with your research?

I hope that my research demonstrates that the field of organization science is critical if we want to improve health care and health. Organization science – with its many insights about leadership, teamwork, managing change, implementation, human resource management, operations and supply chain management, financing and investing, etc. –needs to be embraced, grown, and utilized if we want to improve the functioning of health care organizations for their workforce and patients.