Western States University Hospital - Essay Example

Lack of communication between the nursing staff and staff working in the admitting and patient accounting departments seriously interfered with timely patient entries and investigatory requirements. The nursing staff not being able to inform the managers after transferring a patient resulted in delayed patient entries. Moreover, groundless obstinacy showed by the managers working in the admitting and patient accounting departments regarding who would be in charge of patient census management and not letting the nursing staff understand the crucial details about the new patient accounting and order-entry system also heavily interfered with recording foolproof patient entries, patient transfers to different location, and ordering laboratory tests.

There is undeniably an opportunity for improvement in this system if the nursing staff is taught about fulfilling the requirements of the new management system and if the problem of lack of communication between the nursing staff and managers could be resolved. Regarding the dissatisfaction faced by the hospital’s employees and nursing staff in the case study, a performance improvement team is required in this case. An understanding, compassionate and communicative PI team can bring phenomenal changes within the hospital organizational setup and heavily influence the performance.

Majority of the problems in any hospital result from the groundless biases, prejudices and cultural or racial conflicts between the hospital employees. Highlighting the gravity of these factors in a hospital by members of the PI team can effectively help in evaluating the nature and level of danger a hospital’s performance is in. Relating the facts exposed by Yales University research, Chen (cited in Gill) claims that a heart attack patient may return to the hospital after being operated a few days before owing to the mistake that he/she might have been discharged without a prescribed diuretic.

Such blunders lead the doctors, nurses, and managers on the front lines to blame each other while the hospital leaders remain uninvolved in such a chaotic situation. The PI team should be such that its every member should be able to recognize such difficulties in the hospital setups that mostly result from lack of communication between doctors and nurses. Also the nursing staff should be guided by the PI team to inform the managers working on the order-entry system each time they enter or discharge a patient so that data could be recorded correctly.

Such a PI team would be appropriate for the hospital mentioned in this case study. Answer to Q# 3: Regarding an ideal or close to perfection hospital organizational structure, some employees from nearly every department in the hospital apart from the managing and nursing staff should be on the PI team, so that every active hospital employee could participate in enhancing the performance. The rationale for including some employees representing every department in the hospital in the PI team is that this way problems and difficulties faced by every hospital department could be highlighted and resolved.

The members of the PI team should