Culture
Culture refers to the explicit and implicit customs, norms and rules of an organisation. The organisation
encountered problems concerning the perceived clashing of two organisational cultures. Acute and community health care were seen to have very different organisational cultures which did not easily mesh. Some participants said that the cultural differences were exacerbated by executives' "lack of recognition of the value of community health services" and their perceived desire to own and control the integrated health service. Other participants maintained that the differences were "not unique to this organisation, it's unique to the whole of health". Of those that believed the latter, some participants implied that these cultural differences were mainly due to simple things, while others insisted that they were caused by fundamental differences between acute care's biomedical paradigm and community care's primary health care approach.