Like all major hospitals, we need to adopt and implement innovations that will simultaneously lower costs, increase profits, and improve patient and patient-family satisfaction with our service at Greater Western Hospital. You are a middle manager in our organization who is already being considered for promotion to senior management because of your education and insights.
I refer you to a recent Harvard Business Review journal article which lists and explains a number of effective health care innovations:
Govindarajan, V. and Ramamurti, R. 2013 "Delivering World Class Health-Care, Affordably" Harvard Business Review, November, pp117-122.
I am confident that many of those innovations would give us an advantage over our competitors if we could successfully implement them. I am concerned however, about the probability that there would be considerable resistance, amongst our medical and administrative staff.
Consequently, I am asking for your assistance. There are two specific tasks that I want you to work on as a high priority. Please send me a response to each task (1,500 to 1,900 words for each task; so 3,000 to 3,800 words in total. Do not email your response to your lecturer: upload to Turnitin - you will find the Turnitin link in the Assessment area of your course blackboard).
I want Greater Western Hospital to benefit from your Master's Degree study of Leadership and Management, so please make use of whatever course concepts are relevant and useful (but primarily from the last six topics of the course) - taken from your textbook, journal articles, and Youtube interviews. Those references should help to convince me and the Board that your responses to the tasks are feasible, credible, and supported by research evidence supplemented by lessons taken from highly successful practitioners. Provide a list of references at the end of your submission.
There are two specific things I need you to do:
1. Dr Susan Wong, our Head of Surgery, will have the responsibility of introducing the health care innovations to our medical staff. In particular, Dr Wong will need to introduce the innovation of prolonging the working life of expensive technology through careful maintenance and repair. Narayana Health in India, for instance, has contracted with a U.S. maintenance company, TriMedx, to help double the life of diagnostic equipment. Currently at the Indian hospital, Narayana Health, they routinely reuse medical devices sold as single-use products-such as $160 steel clamps employed during beating-heart surgeries - which Narayana Health sterilize and reuse 50 to 80 times.
Re-use of single-use medical devices is not common practice in Australia.
Dr Wong has already told me that she is opposed to this idea: she said that "the safety of our patients and the morale of our medical staff should be our first priority. I know for a fact that most of our doctors and nurses would be horrified by this suggestion. Even if you could show me that re-using this equipment was medically safe, I know that emotionally, I would be too upset to contribute to this implementation, let alone lead it."
I want you to explain how you would help Dr Wong to manage her emotional reaction to this task, and how you would motivate her to take on the challenge of introducing this innovation to the hospital.
As part of motivating her, you need to convince Dr Wong that people who resist change can be turned around - and she needs to be shown how that can be done. I suggest that providing Dr Wong with examples of how other leaders have successfully overcome resistance would be helpful - but because Dr Wong is a scientist, you will also need to explain why the actions taken by those other leaders were successful.
Finally, please bear in mind that in our executive committee meetings, Dr Wong often ridicules the idea that what works in a business organization would work in a hospital.
2. Indian hospitals have made dramatic and effective changes by re-thinking who does what. Instead of looking at when patients are wheeled into and out of surgery, hospitals should look at the interval between when one patient is wheeled out and the next is wheeled in. In cataract surgery, for instance, we should adopt the Indian hospital method of setting up two surgical stations side by side, with the surgeon positioned between them, assisted by a swivelling microscope and two pairs of paramedics. For each patient, one nursing paramedic hands the doctor sterile instruments and the right implants, focuses the microscope, and bandages the patient.
The other paramedic-called a running nurse-replaces used surgical instruments with sterilized ones and moves the patient into and out of the operating theatre. Switching smoothly from one patient to another, doctors in Indian hospitals briskly perform operations in 10- to 12-minute intervals, completing five or six in an hour rather than the one or two that our surgeons can handle in a conventional operating suite assisted by a single nurse.
This new and innovative method of managing the logistics of operations will depend greatly upon the cooperation and commitment of our nurses. Christine Bingle, our Nurse Manager, will be central to this project, but unfortunately she insists that she has been trained to manage nurses and nursing duties - not to lead and introduce organizational changes and innovations.
I therefore need you to explain what we can do to help Christine feel greater confidence in herself as a person, and confidence in herself as a leader: a leader who can gain willing commitment and cooperation from the nurses who report to her.
Christine recently participated in MBTI training here at the hospital and tells me that she is an ISFP. Perhaps that information will be useful to you in understanding why she lacks confidence as a leader and in designing ways to help her.
Also bear in mind that at Christine's performance review last month, she emphasized that she has a degree in nursing - not in business - and she repeated several times that her nursing degree did not provide any information on, or training in, leadership. She explained that she actually does not know what it is that managers should do in order to lead rather than manage.
Finally, Christine has told me that even if we did give her a list of what she should do as a leader, she would feel like a fake. She feels that who she really is as a person, is a nurse, not a leader - so in her mind, to take on a leadership role would not be authentic.
Use only these articles for referencing for the entire assignment.
David, S and Congleton, C 2013 "Emotional Agility" Harvard Business Review, November pp125-128
Goleman, D. 2000, ‘Leadership that Gets Results' Harvard Business Review, March-April, pp78-90
Quinn, R. Faerman, S. Thompson, M. McGrath, M. Bright, D. 2015 Becoming a Master.