ABSTRACT

Positive attitudes to PD patients cannot solely be conceived as the isolated production of an individual member of staff. As the previous chapter showed, individual staff may use different techniques to adjust to the work with PD patients. However, that is not the whole story, as the questionnaire survey demonstrated in showing that staff attitudes were 30 per cent influenced by the hospital within which they worked. Obviously hospital culture itself must therefore be exerting some form of influence. The interviews of staff contained sufficient detail to permit an elaboration of those influences and how they work, and this chapter will describe mechanisms which divide roughly into two broad areas: how the whole staff of the hospital, as a social group, manages conflict; and how the organization prepares and supports individuals for work with PD patients.