Abstract
Continual innovation to address emerging population needs necessitates
health service ongoing redesign and transformation worldwide. Recent
examples include service transformations in response to covid-19.
Ensuring effective change management processes occur is central to
delivering these transformative changes yet notoriously challenging.
Recent evidence indicates that affective commitment to change amongst
healthcare staff may be an important contributor to gaining support for
change implementation but understudied in healthcare. Our analysis
sought to examine the association between affective commitment to change
and change readiness in projects across the New South Wales health
system in Australia. Our findings indicate that affective commitment to
change; healthcare worker’s emotional and personal perception of the
value of the proposed change, is independently associated with
individual and collective change readiness. Given that achieving change
readiness is a central goal of change management strategies, this pilot
work provides valuable insight to inform change management practices in
healthcare contexts.