Team Performance Measurement in the Health Care Services - Essay Example

TEAM PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT IN HEALTH CARE SERVICESSuppose that you are the manager of a health care team. The Vice President of your entire Division requests that you submit a report a report on your health care organization team has been performing over the past eighteen months. Task: What do you anticipate would be some specific challenges associated with measuring how the team performed? Team Performance Measurement in the Health Care Services In order to fully gauge the efficiency and quality of health care services in any health and medical institution, periodic performance assessments of teams and units are carried out, usually by checking whether the goals made during the start of the performance period were all finished satisfactorily or not.

These periodic performance assessments are deemed important in every line of work, even more so in jobs that deal with life and death situations, as methods of bringing care to the sick and injured can be improved by taking the outcomes of previous performance assessments into consideration (Sundar, Sundar, Pawlowski, Blum, Feinstein, & Pratt, 2007). By creating clear and realistic goals based on the attainability of meeting or exceeding previous goals, patients and members of the community can get an assurance that the services being given by health care personnel in health facilities can either remain as satisfactory as before, or become even better.

Thus, it is important that there is a proper monitoring of the performance of teams and their members to maintain quality services to all stakeholders.However, while monitoring of performance measures and keeping track of goals sounds fairly simple, doing the actual thing can be daunting and even labor-intensive. It can be expected that some problems and challenges could arise during the evaluation itself, such as questioning the reliability of performance measures as well as the accuracy of goals which depend on quantitative characteristics, and could bring challenges in the appropriate assessment of a team’s performance (Zeiss, 2002).

Self-monitoring for each member normally does not pose a problem, even among team members that have other ancillary functions apart from their specific job functions, but when it comes to feedback from other members of the team,interpersonal problems between the evaluated party and the evaluating party could affect the outcomes of total scoring such as supervisory and peer evaluations, which could lead to resentments with each other if not addressed promptly (Reader, Flin, Mearns, & Cuthbertson, 2009; Shi, 2010).

In a related issue, when it is time to assess the team’s performance based on each member’s feedback, issues could rise such as goal changes during the course of the performance period and the non-inclusion of some members during the creation of team goals, which could make the goals either too complex for each member to follow, or too vague or ambiguous to create measurable results (Zeiss, 2002). Lastly, a most-likely encountered problem but also the one which might cause the most serious problems not just for one’s team but for a whole organization would be procrastinations in the part of team leaders, whether on creating timely feedback regarding performances to each team member or promptly evaluating their output either quantitatively or qualitatively within a performance period, which could lead to inefficiencies among team members, and the creation of minor problems that could escalate to major ones if corrections of work methods or habits were not addressed early (Shi, 2010).

Despite numerous challenges and problems that might be encountered in team management, most if not all of these can be prevented and resolved before escalating through open communications, the creation of reasonable and sound goals, as well as building trust within the team (Zeiss, 2002).It can be expected that performance evaluation measures of teams can be both a tricky and a challenging experience for managers, especially for those working in the health care industry. Numerous challenges can appear in assessing whether a team is able to deliver quality-services or not, and this entails the constant and vigilant efforts of all team members in making sure that the team’s goals and the visions of the health care facility are met and satisfied.

Overcoming these problems would mean that patients would get better care, and other stakeholders can be assured of the quality and reliability of services from the health care facility. References