Description of the Organization
The Oakbend Medical Center (OBMC) is a hospital system that has been established at the bequest of one of the local families to contribute to the development of rural healthcare. The majority of OBMC hospitals were intended to respond to the needs of the local ranch communities. The children of the original board of directors remain on the board (OakBend Medical Center, n.d.). Given that the local community has been exposed to exponential growth over the years, both business and the population underwent a series of extraordinary transformations. The vision of OBMC suggests that the hospital should continuously provide care and services of an unsurpassed level of quality even after 70 years of being present in the industry (OakBend Medical Center, n.d.). The current situation shows that the hospital never struggles with providing care of high quality. The presence of the hospital in the area is affected by the fast-paced growth of other healthcare facilities in the area.
The main building of the OBMC is located in a weak economic area. In most cases, the local population only comes to OBMC, as there are no other hospitals to support the community. The main idea behind the local citizens going to OBMC is that there is a specific deep-rooted culture that softly forces them to seek care in the vicinity. As the information on the website of the hospital suggests, OBMC benefits from hierarchical leadership and an unautocratic management style that allows the administration to communicate their vision to employees with no delays (OakBend Medical Center, n.d.). The chain of command is absent across the hospital, allowing the organization to step away from the real autocratic leadership where any violation of the hospital’s policy would end in multiple disciplinary actions intended to punish the employee. There is never a situation where the whole chain of command becomes responsible for the violation (employee-manager, manager-VP, VP-CEO), as only the violator gets punished with the help of acceptable measures that do not require immediate termination.
Significance of the Issue
The biggest issue that currently affects OBMC is that the majority of staff do not have any intention to perform at a high level and gain more insight into the organizational traditions and local culture. This ultimately leads to foremost employee dissatisfaction and the lack of coordination between care providers who then proceed to provide poor patient care. Even though the issue is rather evident, the team seems to show no commitment to organizational change and ignores most of the problems linked to patient care and Intra organizational relationships. Some of the team members display the desire to educate patients and engage in effective communication, but their attempts fall short because of the remainder of the team. One of the initial goals to be pursued after the organizational analysis is to help the staff gain access to meaningful, informative resources that could be used for promoting individual strength and growth. The management does not invest in the hospital’s staff, and it leads to the level of dissatisfaction among team members growing exponentially.
There is no accountability assigned to the team members who perform the worst, meaning that the lack of compliance across OBMC is not appropriately monitored. The vision of OBMC can only be attained under the condition where the team has the willingness to improve the quality of care, educate patients, and secure high levels of employee and patient satisfaction. Unsurpassed services cannot be provided to patients when the staff does not show any intention to remain engaged and develop professional competencies. In order to help OBMC become the best community hospital in the United States, the staff will have to utilize technology more often, provide care in a timely manner, communicate effectively, and engage in lifelong learning. As a result, the administration would enhance compliance and create multiple opportunities for the patients to witness how the organization’s vision is put into practice. The existing resources should be allocated differently in order to achieve greatness in the form of increasingly high patient satisfaction and then build up the momentum and expand uninterruptedly.
Interventions Utilized till Date to Resolve the Challenge
After continuous exposure to an inefficient workflow, the administration was able to transform its processes by addressing the organizational culture and making sure that all the staff-induced relationships inside and outside the hospital were friendly and caring. With time, the relationships between team members began to resemble the familial ones, as team members seemed to know each other very well. This public attitude also affected the local community members who became motivated to learn more about their health condition and help the team by following all the treatment instructions carefully. As soon as the administration started paying more attention to organizational culture and traditions, both employees and patients became interested in enhancing the local community and promoting health across other community members. The former poor reputation of the hospital was eradicated with the help of tradition-based approaches that allowed the administration to transform the organizational perspective. The hospital was revitalized with the help of technological innovations and constant employee encouragement.
The new CEO’s energy also was an essential factor in the process of establishing a new organizational strategy. He helped employees not to fall short of expectations and always strive for the best possible outcomes. By being passionate about patient engagement and safety, the administration ensured that they could utilize every opportunity they had to accentuate the willingness of the hospital to regain its reputation. They ensured that the local population acknowledged the transformation and was interested in the innovative approaches to healthcare proposed by the administration. Through multiple meetings with the staff, the administration emphasized the importance of implementing the new tools.
The application of the proposed instruments was not flawless, but the administration was able to inspire employees to provide patients with high-quality care and promote local traditions. With time, the team became able to build patient engagement around the existing information and increase patient satisfaction with the help of a variety of activities that helped those patients to learn and provide timely feedback. The administration encouraged patient engagement through further enforcement of disciplinary actions. Team members who did not utilize the newest technologies and ideas were subject to additional learning sessions intended to help them gain more insight into why the change was so important.
Translating the Program to the Current Organization
In order to translate the program to the current organization, it will be necessary for the CEO to display their leadership attributes and ensure that they are as indiscriminate as possible. An unbiased view of the local community and team members would help the administration generate positive relations with the local patients while also motivating them to come back to the same hospital next time (Asiri et al., 2016). Also, the leader should possess a strong feeling of individual responsibility and adequately utilize their personal humility to bring out the best in their team. There has to be a multidisciplinary team that is going to protect the organizational values and promote them among patients by educating them on the most important ideas regarding the history of the hospital. The leader of the team should call for unification in order to prevent a high level of employee turnover and create a positive image for the hospital. Based on the past experience of OBMC, it may be claimed that the current organization could benefit from implementing democratic leadership and removing overly strict principles from the hospital’s agenda.
Instead of focusing on revenue generation, the team will have to achieve patient satisfaction through a constructive, never-ending dialog with patients. The present issues should not be played down either, as it would lead to employees remaining demotivated and unwilling to perform at a high level. Poor execution of the current tools available to the hospital could be mitigated with the help of one or two experts in the field who would hold several organizational meetings to explain how a team of employees could make a considerable difference (Ghazisaeidi et al., 2015). Patients and their families could also participate in the process by writing down their care-related experiences on unique cards. The Chief Nursing Officer would then read those cards occasionally to ensure that employees recognize their success and understand how they could improve the existing state of affairs even further. Also, all organizational processes and systems should include renewed protocols for the potential workplace incidents to save time in the case where either a patient or a team member exposed themselves to an unknown threat.
Patient satisfaction may also be achieved with the help of establishing additional protocols intended to help the team collect all the vital information required to provide the patient with the care of the highest quality possible. There should be specific levels of accountability for each tier of employees, as it would help the administration ensure that there is a possibility to watch out for improper behaviors and modify them without having to resign the offender. Without upsetting the team, the administration is going to motivate them; instead, helping every team member realize why it is essential to follow the vision and continue effective practice (Nica, 2015). The idea here is that the organization as a whole should not be responsible for promoting satisfaction. Instead, there should be employees who are interested in creating the best environment for care provision. There could be fundraising initiatives, for example, established to support the vulnerable populations from the area and make sure that the patients who are at risk are visible.
On the other hand, the administration should display an adequate amount of attention toward the patients by engaging them in healthcare practices and continually asking them for honest feedback. This would not only improve the hospital’s reputation across the area but also create additional opportunities in terms of how the hospital could achieve its vision and maintain it. Even though the current hospital is not rural and does not promote the same values as OBMC, the intention to provide high-quality services to all patients should be entrenched in every message that the administration conveys to the team and patients (Asiri et al., 2016). Passion for high-quality healthcare is what is going to drive the hospital’s growth and development, as the team members would improve their understanding of how they should approach patients and develop a consistent strategy of communicating with them. The hospital is going to gain community trust, as public opinion is also going to change for the better. Proper discipline and a consistent system of rewards mixed with a free workplace are going to help the administration maintain the vision and advocate for immaculate patient care.
The hospital in question is also going to improve its financial performance with the help of the proposed program, even though there are several other respectable hospitals in the area. The ability to generate increased profits while also taking care of the hospital’s reputation is going to be the foremost priority of the hospital’s administration, as otherwise, the initiatives mentioned above would be deemed ineffective. In order to improve the current state of affairs and successfully translate the experience of OBMC to a different environment, the administration could hire additional recognizable practitioners to attract more patients to the hospital. Another idea is to have the team learn more about the utilization of information technologies, as the 21st century is the age of big data and artificial intelligence, where the lack of tech knowledge is a serious drawback. As the hospital’s administration is going to focus on improving the organizational culture, creating learning opportunities, and establishing a tech-savvy working environment, there will be more chances to provide high-quality patient care and utilize available resources in the most efficient manner.
The Scorecard
Demartini and Trucco (2017) proposed the Balanced Scorecard that might be used for the current hospital to assess the overall organizational success. The idea was that the team would have to participate in communication training to develop a shared language. With an interdisciplinary team, the presence of a shared language would mean the increased ability to make informed decisions and foresee their potential impact. Fleiszer et al. (2015) suggested that the Balanced Scorecard could be the shortest pathway to excellence in patient care provision due to the improved strategic planning and the ability to point out the biggest challenges that could affect the team in both short- and long-term scenarios. Since the metrics in the only thing that changes after the implementation of the Balanced Scorecard, the process of annual strategic planning would become less resource-intensive and create room for the provider-patient dialog and subsequent care quality improvements.
According to the information from Gao and Gurd’s (2015) article, the Balanced Scorecard could also be beneficial because it would help the administration lessen the turnover rate and motivate the existing employees to perform at a higher level. With improved care and a renewed outlook on the patient-provider relationship, the hospital would easily cater to specific patient preferences and, in turn, achieve more exceptional results in terms of patient satisfaction. All of the proposed initiatives would be applicable without huge monetary expenditures, as team members’ motivation would be the critical source of improved performance and communication (Ghazisaeidi et al., 2015). If the Balance Scorecard is used to assess the hospital’s performance, the administration will be able to facilitate the development of a strategic plan intended to aid the team in terms of optimizing their performance.
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References
Asiri, S. A., Rohrer, W. W., Al-Surimi, K., Da’ar, O. O., & Ahmed, A. (2016). The association of leadership styles and empowerment with nurses’ organizational commitment in an acute health care setting: A cross-sectional study. BMC Nursing, 15(1), 38-48.
Demartini, C., & Trucco, S. (2017). Are performance measurement systems useful? Perceptions from health care. BMC Health Services Research, 17(1), 96-111.
Fleiszer, A. R., Semenic, S. E., Ritchie, J. A., Richer, M. C., & Denis, J. L. (2015). An organizational perspective on the long-term sustainability of a nursing best practice guidelines program: A case study. BMC Health Services Research, 15(1), 535-551.
Gao, T., & Gurd, B. (2015). Meeting the challenge in performance management: The diffusion and implementation of the balanced scorecard in Chinese hospitals. Health Policy and Planning, 30(2), 234-241.
Ghazisaeidi, M., Safdari, R., Torabi, M., Mirzaee, M., Farzi, J., & Goodini, A. (2015). Development of performance dashboards in the healthcare sector: Key practical issues. Acta Informatica Medica, 23(5), 317-321.
Nica, E. (2015). Moral leadership in health care organizations. American Journal of Medical Research, 2(2), 118-123.
OakBend Medical Center. (n.d.). Our story. Web.