Health care operations management roles and goals - Essay Example

Health Care Operations Management Roles and Goals Health Care Operations Management Chase 2003, p.4 defines operation management as “the conversion process that transforms inputs such as raw materials and labour into outputs in the form of finished goods and services”. The generally accepted view is that management has four key functional areas namely planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. Planning essentially involves the setting of goals and the strategies for achieving the goals set.

Organizing in essence is taking the decisions on what tasks are done by whom and when and where these tasks will be achieved. Leading calls for motivating the people in the organization towards the objectives set, which means getting the work done by these people. Controlling is the function that monitors the progress towards the goals and taking the necessary corrective action, should the progress be unsatisfactory (Langabeer, 2007). Managers in health care operations thus have to play several roles.

These roles can be classified as the informational roles, the decisional roles, and the interpersonal roles. The informational role consists of collecting, monitoring and disseminating information that is garnered from internal as well as external sources relevant to the efficient functioning of the organization. The decision roles consist of making critical decisions in the organization. These decisions include the appropriate allocation of resources of the organization either in manpower, finance or materials to the disparate units in the organization.

Rewarding employees for good performance and punishing employees for poor performance, and negotiating between employees and others in the organization. The inter personal role involves training and motivating employees, serving s their spokesperson, facilitating communication and the exchange of information between the various units and professional present in a healthcare organization, and acting as a liaison between these units and professionals (Langabeer, 2007). Operations managers thus play several roles in an organization.

However, it must be remembered that a health care organization differs from other organizations. Within a health care organization service is provided by personnel, who are extremely specialized in their tasks, governed by a set of professional principals and values. In other words for achieving the quality and service objectives of the organization disparate specialized professionals need to work as a team to meeting these objectives. Furthermore there is call for highly specialized equipment and devices in the delivery of the quality standards of health service.

These factors impact on the roles that operation management plays in a healthcare organization. Furthermore the goals in a healthcare organization are sometimes not clear as there are different goals involved like clinical goals and financial goals. The organizations are complex due to the various specialized units and professionals that are needed in the organization. Command and control functions are thus not easy. Relationships can remain ambiguous in the organization, with many of the specialized units remaining unconnected and functioning independent of the other specialized units in the delivery of their function.

Yet they need to be interconnected for the delivery of quality service (Langabeer, 2007).Health care organizations thus present a much more complex organizational set up and complex mode of functioning, which is relevant to the role played by operational management. There are essentially three roles as seen earlier consisting of the informational roles, the decisional roles, and the interpersonal roles. While the informational role and the decision role remain important to operations management in a health care organization, it is the interpersonal role that is most important for operations management.

The most critical issue that is seen in a health care organization is that it is made of disparate specialised units and professionals, likely to function independent of each other and therefore service might be provided in a disjointed manner, leading to inadequacies in the service providing. Overcoming this becomes crucial for the success of operations management and can be achieved by operations management, if it successfully achieves the exchange of information between the various units and professional present in a healthcare organization, as a part of its interpersonal role.

Thus for operations management in a health care organization the interpersonal role becomes the most important (Langabeer, 2007). Literary References Chase, R. B. (2003). Fundamentals of Operation Management. Fourth Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. Langabeer, J. R. (2007). Health Care Operations Management: A Quantitative Approach to Business and Logistics. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.