Case Study: Managing Transformational Change in a Healthcare Organisation Introduction YOU are employed with Team Gold, a management consulting services company specialising in assisting organizations experiencing major change management issues. The physicians and staff at a prominent teaching hospital were coming to terms with major change. Due to external forces created by health-care reform, their world was turning upside down. Where they once broadly encouraged patients to come in for services, they now were supposed to send many of them to less costly community hospitals. The idea was to manage operating costs more efficiently by referring out the more routine cases, while keeping the more complex and challenging ones.This represented a whole new mentality. On top of that, the revenue structure was changing to focus on patient outcomes instead of fee for serviceswhile preserving a focus on innovation, patient outcomes, and quality of care. As a teaching hospital, their fees were higher. Thus, they would need to show that their services merited those feesno easy feat when their operating costs, included the funding of research, educating doctors, and caring for underprivileged communities was on the increase. The Business Problem Team Gold were engaged to work with a medical officer who faced a dual challenge. First, he needed to overcome the natural change resistance of his internal peers and get them to understand the urgency for change in order to operate more efficiently. Simultaneously, he needed to convince the outside world that there was indeed better value in paying more for the services of an academic health-care organization in a time of health-care reform. The medical officer was not sure how best to articulate these messages to non-technical audiences, and he was not comfortable answering the tough questions that inevitably were going to arise. The issues were often complicated, unresolved, emotional, and highly politicized. In other words, he needed to be able to lead the organization through a transformational change. Change Management Approach First, Team Gold helped our client develop the messaging for his internal audiences. He had to get physicians and other staff members on board with what the hospital needed to become in the face of health-care reform. If we could work on the internal challenges first, the company could provide a united front when dealing with outside forces. The physicians and staff needed messages that helped them better understand why all this was happeningall of the external pressures ranging from changing demographics to politically instigated health-care reform that demanded a response. Team Gold crafted messages that walked people through the need to be patient while the change was implemented. Externally, he needed to communicate to the media, the medical staff, administrators, and the general population. Our goal here was to ensure that people understood why the hospital was doing what it was doing. Additionally, he needed to reassure these audiences that the emphases on patient outcomes and quality of care were still in playdespite the fact that the hospitals operating model was changing. With this audience, he also needed to be ready to answer the tough questions that would arise about why the hospitals care deserved the higher fees that were charged. Conclusion Through the process of working together to develop this messaging, our client developed confidence in answering difficult questions in a volatile period for health care. Our messages implicitly addressed the needs and concerns of the audiences he was targeting, pre-empting many tough questions. On top of that, he knew he could effectively answer difficult and sensitive questions in front of a high-profile stakeholders consisting of press, doctors, staff, and the medical community. This was an important step in getting everyone on the same page about how and why the hospital was changing. While the final outcome remains a work in progress, he now has the tools and messages he needs to see both his internal and external stakeholders through a seismic transition. Source: https://www.bates-communications.com/insights/bid/83240/Case-Study-Healthcare-Managing-Transformational-Change-and-Answering-the-Tough-Questions-Head-On accessed on 9.9.2018 (Links to an external site.) Links to an external site. DQ1. What re-skilling was required to achieve the results ? Discussion Guidelines: Please answer all three questions presented above Word count for this discussion is minimum one question should be 850 words and other two 400 words Use at least 5 references for each question and citation within your posts as per Harvard Referencing style.
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