Healthcare management comprises a broad range of activities. Such activities focus on providing direction and leadership to organizations that offer personal health services and to the departments, divisions, or services that constitute these organizations. Managers in the health care system oversee the completion of specific tasks in the best possible manner and ensure the adequacy of the available resources to support organizational activities. The decisions made by healthcare managers are not limited to providing timely medical services to patients but also comprise attaining set performance targets for every department; thus, each decision affects the performance of a healthcare facility. These decisions consider the internal and external domains essential in influencing quality service delivery to patients.
Even with these factors being considered, managers in the healthcare sector have often needed more vital skills paramount to a medical facility's existence. For example, a minor error in decision-making by a manager could plunge a healthcare institution into its deathbed. In as much as the external and internal domain elements are integral in decision-making, more than having adequate resources is needed to achieve the organizational goals. Often, managers cannot adequately allocate these resources to business activities depending on their importance, thus contributing to the firm's demise. For example, they forget the words of Theodore Roosevelt, "Do what you can, where you are, with what you have," to lead their organizations to success. This affects most healthcare centers and is blamed mainly on the management, eventually leading to their closure.
In healthcare, management involves the overall activities of coordinating the efforts of employees to accomplish the administration's objectives effectively. This is attained through various available means and resources such as financial, human, natural, and Technology.
Poor or careless management can lead to the demise of any health organization. A growing tension between physicians and administration is further fueled by physician greed as modern doctors are no longer at the helm of clinical operations but have to answer to the administration. For instance, Canada has ten times as many healthcare administrators as Germany, even though Germany has twice the population of Canada. Canada has one healthcare administrator for every 1,415 citizens. Germany: one healthcare administrator for every 15,545. (Licia Corbella, 2022)
Management and leadership are two intertwined activities that contribute to the success of an organization. Ignoring one role over the other means that some activities will be performed well while others will be done below par. The functions of managers center on leading, planning, controlling, organizing, and staffing, while leaders focus on setting a clear vision, motivating employees, guiding workers through their work, and leading them toward achieving set goals. By ignoring the leadership role, managers contribute to the demise of an organization through a high staff turnover and uninspiring results.
Although every company and department needs a manager, today's management speaks of employee motivation, inspiration, and exceptional delegation. While most individuals in positions of authority can take instruction and delegate, many are not visionary leaders.
To integrate the management and leadership roles, an individual should be willing and ready to delegate responsibility to motivate the team. It shows the manager's trust in their group and grants them additional time to develop the employees and the hospital's vision.
As a manager, it becomes necessary to develop a relationship with the staff to improve performance, which is a leadership role.
The motivational role of a leader is something that managers should pay attention to in their day-to-day interactions with employees. Managers should take it upon themselves to know what motivates each worker, improve their job satisfaction and increase productivity.
Managers must learn that it's beyond just figures and charts. There are human minds and lives behind those figures, and they are what counts. This is particularly important in the healthcare industry, where it's not just about manufacturing but caring for people.
Finally, understanding the basics of people management isn't for managers alone. Everyone in a medical care facility must deal with people. So all members of staff, doctors, nurses, and even the cleaners, must be good at dealing with people courteously and agreeably.
Managers who carefully integrate leadership roles into their activities have a high chance of prospering in their careers and facilitating the success of their healthcare facilities.
Moreover, a medical center has several indicators of poor communication, including inaccurate or incomplete patient records, resulting in workplace conflict, medical errors, high-stress levels, poor decision-making, and long waiting times. For a patient, poor communication affects the quality of care they receive, their recovery, and the duration they stay in the hospital. Poorly communicating vital information can be disastrous in the medical profession. In as much as communication mishaps are inevitable, effective communication can lead to better patient outcomes and the overall success of the healthcare facility.
To effectively address this remedy of poor communication in a medical institution, physicians ought to understand effective communication's verbal and non-verbal components. The verbal elements address the details of the message, like the selection of words; the non-verbal aspect entails body language elements such as facial expression, posture, spatial distance, and gesture; and the other component deals with the pitch, tone, volume, and pacing of the voice. Understanding these aspects of effective communication determines, to a great extent, the patient's satisfaction, clinical outcome, and observance of advice. These practical communication components affect how a physician communicates with colleagues, patients, and attendants and handles difficult situations.
Some strategies medical professionals can use to address the challenge of poor communication are:
Regularly training teams to ensure medics communicate directly and clearly with one another.
Department heads should directly observe procedures to pinpoint and correct deficiencies in teamwork.
Courtesy and respect should be highlighted as a critical part of organizational culture. People will work together much more effectively if there is mutual respect and politeness in addressing each other. It will also enhance the image of the healthcare organization as patients will be managed politely and respectfully.
Have a unified technology that provides real-time data across a healthcare facility to address any information gaps and streamlining communication. This remedy must be accessible to teams in every department, prehospital networks, and health systems.
A good communication process ensures that physicians know the best way to disclose devastating news, keep colleagues motivated and united, and conduct a medical interview with a patient. Besides, effective communication enhances the trustworthy relationship between a patient and a medical professional. This, in turn, contributes to a patient's therapeutic healing process and improves the physician's job satisfaction.
Highly qualified management helps to develop a strategic plan which addresses all issues relating to every department. Through sound leadership, a business can turn around its threats into opportunities and weaknesses into strengths.