Faith Community Hospital: A Vision for the Future
...nia, is its problems with communication systems. This is a universal problem throughout the organization. Caregivers do not adequately listen or comprehend patient instructions and vice versa. Staff members do not adequately understand or follow set guidelines of behavior. Executive management does not adequately evaluate and implement necessary checks and balances to staff behavior. All levels of leadership within the Faith Community Hospital do not adequately interface with external organizations like Medicare, Medicaid, or Child Protective Services, to name a few. The lack of prompt, reliable communication, in an industry where every decision could be life threatening, is a sure means of inviting a media-frenzied disaster. Alternative Solutions (What the hospital can do right now) The possible solutions that will resolve the problems discussed above are many and varied. To begin, any alternative solution that seeks to remedy the problems that Faith Community Hospital is having with its organizational processes must be in the form of written guidelines. The hospital must come up with a standard set of written procedures that the staff must follow. If the staff member does not follow these procedures, the hospital must hold that person accountable. Another solution that could help to resolve the organizational processes problem is to re-evaluate the hospitals mission and to clarify its mission statement. Faith Community Hospital must re-write its mission statement in such a way as to remove any ambiguity that could develop into personal interpretation. If the committee cannot clarify the mission statement to this extent, the hospital must develop a training plan that every staff member would adhere to on a recurring basis. By continually exposing the staff to the “nuts and bolts” of the guiding principles of the hospital as identified in the hospital’s mission statement and standard operating procedures, there would be less ambiguity and a more focused workforce. In any organization, ethics plays a huge role. When an organization has problems dealing with ethical issues, it must resolve those problems or face extinction. The Faith Community Hospital is having ethics problems and must consider one or all of the following resolutions to correct these problems. One resolution that could possibly correct the problem is to assess all the different ethics that apply to the organization and provide clear guidance to the entire workforce that detail exact reactions to every action or scenario. By doing this, there would be less ambiguity in what are acceptable and not acceptable actions. It would provide alternative solutions to most ethically sensitive decisions that the caregivers apply to the patients. Another step that the hospital can take is to initiate a training plan whereby every staff member receives initial indoctrination and then recurring instruction on the subject of making ethical decisions based upon the ethics of the hospital and in the hospital’s mission statement. By instituting a training plan for the entire workforce of the Faith Community Hospital, management can eliminate the problem of differing ethics. Communication problems at the Faith Community Hospital are perhaps the most damaging but potentially the easiest to overcome. Communication is, “the imparting, conveying, or exchange of ideas, knowledge, information, etc. (whether by speech, writing, or signs)” (Simpson, 2005, communication). If the hospital cannot adequately express the ideas and more particularly the ideals and ethics that the organization believes in, then the workforce has to define these ideals and ethics on a personal basis. To overcome the problem of inadequate communication, the hospital can implement any of the following actions. The first action the hospital can implement is to begin a feedback system whereby each member of the workforce can anonymously, or not, provide feedback to executive management. By enabling feedback to occur between the decision-maker and those the decision effects most, is a quick means for the CEO to easily assess if the organization’s decisions are counterproductive or if they counter individual’s personal ethics. With this knowledge, the CEO can, more frequently, evaluate the hospital’s policy and determine if the seemingly difference in the individual’s ethics and those of the organization are valid and if so, begin the process of changing those ethics to become more in line with each other. Another way to increase communication within the organization is to institute provide email accounts to every member of the workforce. By doing this, policy and guidance can be delivered to every member of the workforce from executive management on an instantaneous basis. Management can discuss and resolved problems immediately or, at the very least, identify them for future discussion. Final Solution (what the hospital should do about it) After evaluating each of the possible alternative solutions for each of the three general problems discussed above, two solutions are common to all three problem. First, the Faith Community Hospital should re-write its mission statement for greater clarity and reduce the possibility of personal interpretation of what that mission statement means. The hospital will form a committee that will consist of the department heads of all seven departments. The executive vice president will chair this committee and ensure the goals of the committee are constantly in alignment with the goals of the hospital. The committee’s mission is to evaluate and re-write the Faith Community Hospital mission statement so that its meaning, both verbal and implied, is clearer to both the internal workforce and the outside agencies with which the hospital has business relatio...