The case study conducted by Barsoux et al. (2007) examines the King Edgar Hospitals NHS Trust and the leadership improvements. The initial problem was that the hospitals suffered from frequent patients’ complaints, low ratings, lack of budget, and the absence of social services support (Barsoux et al., 2007). The problem was undressed through the implementation of the nurse-led discharge (NLD) project. As the outcome of this project, the Trust experienced a decline in the rating and the enhancement of financial problems. Thus, apart from the improvements in clients satisfaction, the NLD project did not bring any significant positive results. The current paper contains an investigation of the described case.
The mission of the NLD project was to cope with the hospitals difficulties described above. One of the leadership’s mistakes was the ignoring of the medical staff’s view of the hospital. Physicians, as well as nurses, did not appreciate the necessity of extra workload. Besides, the head of the Trust wanted to increase the importance of nurses and give them more power. According to the plan, nurses had to control physicians in terms of charging the patients. The problem with this decision was that nurses had to take additional training and more tasks as well as scarify their responsibilities for patient care.
Another problem was that the implementation of NLD required the hiring of new staff members and the increased pressure on the current ones. Additionally, the discharge system was not working smoothly from the very beginning and, thus, a lot of time was spent on the system’s adjustments. The existing financial difficulties also hindered the NLD, and the leadership of the Trust was better able to consider the lack of the budget. The new initiative required the requalification of nurses and the installation of new equipment and expenditures on increased salaries since the nurses had to work more hours, and the new personnel was to be employed.
To sum up, the new leadership strategy was unsuccessful due to multiple reasons. Most importantly, the suggested program’s failure was in the overestimation of nurses capabilities and the attempt to give them more responsibilities than they could cope with. Finally, one could argue that it would be more beneficial to create such a system under which staff members are divided into teams headed by a leader. The head of these teams should assign tasks for personnel and control multidisciplinary collaboration between distinct groups.
Reference
Barsoux, J. L., Gilmartin, M. J., Battilana, J., & D’Aunno, T. (2007). Leading Organizational Change: Improving Hospital Performance. INSEAD.