Why Is Delegation a Particularly Important Issue in Healthcare Organizations - Essay Example

Nursing Question Why is delegation a particularly important issue in healthcare organizations? Healthcare is a diversified and extensive field that requires professional cooperation between various healthcare professionals. Besides facilitation of efficiency in service provision, responsibility for the various aspects of management is spread across the hierarchies. Healthcare provision deals with important elements of human life which must be clearly defined in order to ensure protection of the basic human right to life. Delegation of responsibilities and power ensures that the top manager reduces the risk of inherent individual mistakes and incompetence. Through such risk reduction strategy in healthcare provision, it implies that the provision of healthcare achieves its fundamental obligation of alienating human suffering in a systematic way. Healthcare institutions have various facilities that are applied in provision of the diversified services offered at the institutions. It would be tedious for the manager to handle all the facility needs and at the same time. On the other hand, a clear authority over the integrity of the various facility aspects would be compromised if accountability checks are not implemented. It follows that a manager can perform better if accountability for various healthcare facilities is distributed among various individuals. Accountability is enhanced if a specific scope of institutional facility needs is delegated to a specific individual. Being answerable for a specified and limited scope of institutional property as sensitive as healthcare facility is can only be enhanced in a defined delegation plan. Failure to ensure a discrete delegation plan over the various healthcare facilities can be labeled as a way to increase human suffering instead of alleviating it. Question 2 Staffing is one of the most critical decisions a manager makes. Describe the optimal process for staffing on medical floor in hospital. Staffing for any organization must meet the basic requirement of professional conversance for every section of the organization. This implies that for organizations that have higher demand for specialized professional training, a makeshift staffing program cannot enable the organization to meet its specific objectives. Healthcare organizations are perhaps one of the most demanding when it comes to stringent staffing requirements. Staffing a medical facility has no shortcut when meeting professional qualification needs for the successful candidates. This is necessitated by the sensitive nature of professional input needed for healthcare industry to take care of the human health issues. Academic qualification must be impeccable for prospective professional candidates with an interest in filling such a staff position. Besides academic excellence, practical experience must be met to satisfy enough exposure required in sensitive practical assignments as those involved in healthcare. Generally, an excellent academic qualification cannot stand in for practical exposure for the various healthcare practices that candidates ought to have attained. On the other hand, an excellent practical exposure is not enough to enable a candidate without the appropriate academic achievement to take up a position of a professional medical staff member. Staffing a medical facility such as a hospital requires the appropriate verification of achievement of the various professional exposure needs. Such verification is almost always performed by medical regulatory and certification bodies on behalf of the entire profession fraternity. Such professional regulatory bodies also exist across sensitive professions to ensure that only accredited staff members make their way into sensitive professions. Optimal process for staffing medical facilities is therefore guided by accreditation rules which are aimed at verifying qualification and wiping out of quarks. Question 3 Describe the ideal performance appraisal process. An ideal performance appraisal is one that allows a genuine representation of the actual employee performance with minimum errors, both intentional and unintentional. It is also an expectation that an ideal performance appraisal data is availed at exactly the needed time and in the form it is required. While some people may reject this fact, an ideal performance appraisal process is acceptable and anxiously waited for by employees since it gives a true score of their hard work. However, others will also reject an ideal performance appraisal process since it does not conceal irregular practices that every organization would like to eliminate among its staff members. An ideal performance appraisal process is therefore precisely composed of certain elements that facilitate maximization of the benefits of appraisal objectives. Firstly, is involves true and accurate performance scores of employees in an organization. Every employee’s strength must be represented just as weaknesses may be pointed in an ideal process. It is also true that biases are eliminated in an ideal process, which should tackle the problem of negative prejudicial tags that employers’ may place on their employees and employees’ negative attitude on their employers. Approval is therefore spread across various levels of interaction and surveillance systems, with subjectivity element being encouraged. Secondly, the process should always be reflective of the most updated status of performance, since employees’ morale, commitment motivation and behavior change with changes in a number of factors. Thirdly, cooperation for the process should be facilitated by all employees whose attitude should be such as would enable good relations after the appraisal. Ideal performance appraisal should facilitate cohesion than divisions among employees and supervisors. Question 4 What is the best way to motivate nurses in the workplace? Nurses’ performance is subject to a number of factors, all of which can either facilitate high output or drastically reduce performance. Motivation is either improved or reduced by the nature of the working environment that the nurses are working in. The most applicable motivation booster is the remuneration accorded for services delivered. When a reasonable pay is made available to the nurses, it can be predicted that motivation will be high, since earnings act as a major motivation for many employees. Working environment is the other factor that may impact on the motivation that the nurse obtains from the workplace. Generally, working relations are the most definitive of the environment that an employee works in. Good relations among the nurses must be promoted in a variety of ways to built team favorable dynamics in healthcare provision. On the other hand, relations between nurses and top level medical professionals and hospital management must be cordial and supportive. Nurses cannot perform with maximum motivation if they are subjected to harsh relations from their seniors. Working relations must be built on professional grounds without demeaning each others role in the provision of services. Nurses’ welfare issues also carry an important element of motivation for the kind of service they deliver to the healthcare profession. Welfare programs such as provision of an enabling environment to further education in the medical field could act as an important motivator to the nurses. Promotional opportunities for the nurses on a definite merit basis can facilitate the required motivation boost since it offers an element of reward and appreciation of an individual’s effort (MTD Training, 48). Handling personal problems among the nurses can also facilitate enhanced commitment and motivation, for instance in assisting them to achieve work-life balance. Question 5 How can managers create a culture that is open to the constant change of the modern healthcare organization? In an industry with forces of change exerting pressure in all dimensions, it is important that the management knows how to deal with negative forces while maintaining positive forces. The modern business environment is faced by a myriad of changes which range from technological advancement to financial hardships and uncertainties. The healthcare industry faces potent challenges of technology which threatens traditional practices to be obsolete as time progresses since they are overtaken by medical research needs. Management in the healthcare can only create a culture that embraces new technology in order to keep up with the pace of advancements. Beginning with an internal facility facelift to capture the modern technological advancements, the management must also ensure that the available staff members are conversant with the application of the technology. Such a complicated culture demands for frequent on-job training through refresher courses as well as education upgrading programs. It follows that the modern equipment application needs will continue to present a major change in the ordinary way of carrying out business in the healthcare industry. Research for major healthcare challenges will likewise need a close following from the medical fraternity as guided by the management. Encouraging such a culture of rushing with swift changes in healthcare research will be a necessity for the modern healthcare manager than ever before. Cooperation among various healthcare providing institutions for an increased risk exposure will continue to raise an alarm on the role of management and participation culture. Changing lifestyle and emerging pathogens and disease risks present trying management times that will require an extensive cooperation drive for healthcare institutions. Work Cited MTD Motivation Skills, Frederiksberg, Denmark: Ventus Publishing ApS, 2010. Print Read More