Enhancing Psychological Safety at a Community Health Centre: A Multi-Level Intervention Plan
Abstract
This paper presents a multi-level intervention plan for a community health centre experiencing a 26% decline in psychological safety scores over three years, 31% annual turnover, and disproportionate attrition among racialized employees. The intervention framework integrates positive psychology and systems theory into three coordinated components targeting leadership, team, and organizational levels.
The plan addresses a critical evidence gap: few studies measure psychological safety as an outcome of organizational intervention, likely because assessing it requires team-level consensus (Edmondson, 1999). This framework proposes diagnostic and appreciative methods combined with carefully timed evaluations to track PS as a measurable outcome.
Three interventions form an integrated system: inclusive leadership development (leveraging Li et al.’s meta-analysis of 105 samples, N=39,948, showing r=0.59 between inclusive leadership and PS), psychological safety team workshops (informed by Nielsen et al.’s cluster-randomized trial with 330 workers), and structural policy redesign (guided by Solinger et al.’s meta-analysis of 137 longitudinal studies showing people-focused change produces sustained positive effects, d=0.18).
Key Findings
What The Research Shows
- 1
Meta-analytic evidence: inclusive leadership correlates r=0.59 with psychological safety across 38 studies (N=13,872) — Li et al., 2024
- 2
Healthcare-specific: PS scores increased 34.8% over 3 months in a five-hospital COVID-era study through inclusive leadership intervention — Ahmed et al., 2020
- 3
People-focused change produces sustained positive effects (d=+0.18) while directive change produces sustained negative effects (d=−0.22) — Solinger et al., 2021, 137 studies
- 4
Collective team-level participation significantly predicts engagement (β=0.16) and lower burnout (β=0.51), outperforming individual training — Nielsen et al., 2021
Methodology
How This Research Was Conducted
Multi-level intervention design: individual (supervisor coaching), team (PS workshops), organizational (policy redesign)
Evidence synthesis from meta-analyses and cluster-randomized trials
Systems theory and positive psychology theoretical framework
12-month phased implementation with sequenced interventions
Pre/post evaluation using validated PS instruments at the team level
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