Question

Your text discusses characteristics of strengths or weaknesses such as value, rareness, imitability, and sustainability. These are important considerations for health care leaders as we assess or own organizations.

Which characteristic do you feel is most important for health care organizations? Support your answer, and provide specific examples for your own health care facility or a facility which you would someday like to lead.

Answer 1

I think the most important characteristic o the Health Care Organization is add value to their services to the patients or to the Community at large. Value helps to analyze the internal environment of any given Health Care organization. It helps gauging the Resource capability of the Organization; whether or not it is capable to mitigate any given threats or to determine whether such resources capable enough to exploit any new emerging opportunity in the Community. Understanding the Value in turn facilitates in ascertaining the internal strength of a Health Care Organization. Exploitation of resource or mitigation of threat can give rise to the over earnings of an Organization or reduction in costs incurred by neutralizing the threats, or even both. Therefore, I feel Value as a characteristic is important.

Take for example, the value of quality in health care organizations. The value of quality in Health Care is important owing to the following reasons:

• With the technological advancement, there has been an urgent need for the Healthcare Organizations to align its activities with technology so as to achieve the desired results more efficiently. Alignment of technology certainly needs human intervention for selection of the appropriate technology and for installing the same into the system.
• Quality is further important to evaluate the health conditions of the patients in the Organizations and thereby enabling the Organizations to serve better to the patients.
• Quality ensures the safety within the Organization such that the patients can rest assured that the treatment shall not harm them in anyway. An overall effective care is one of the best outcomes of quality in healthcare organizations. It helps in equating the care across all the segments of the community. Quality, coupled with technology, helps assisting the patients with the medical status of theirs which is beneficial to the patient in future, if need be. .
• It helps in ensuring positive feedback from the customers of the Organization. Most of the feedback is concerned how the Staff and the Medical care provider behaved and treated them.
• Time consumption for treating the patients could be effectively reduced without compromising upon the Health standards, by doing away with unnecessary delays observed in the process of such treatments.
• The concerned specialist could also be consulted well in time if the Quality standards are in place.
• It helps in determining proper protocols in place for fair treatment.
• Overall, the quality helps in determining how effective the Organization is towards the care of its patients.

In order to implement quality in a Health Organization, as a Leader, I believe that the employees need to undergo appropriate training because only that shall make it positively viable for the medical staff to efficiently treat the patients with a touch of warmth in their personality so that it soothes the pains of the patients to some extent. Moreover, extensive training is also needed to be imparted to the medical staff so that there is no compromise with the quality standards of the Hospital. Further, it is also essential that various motivation factors including monetary as well as non-monetary are considered to keep their morale high and retain them in the Organization. In terms of recruitment, no compromise could be done upon their basic educational skills and knowledge that is required to cater to a Health Organization. Only once their caliber is tested, that one could recruit them for polishing their skills or imparting them with newer ones. In this manner, higher quality could be ascertained in a Health care Organization and in true sense, the characteristic of ‘Value’ could be realized.