Introduction
Across the globe, the business entities have embraced quality improvement in their production, manpower, machine, materials, environment, measurement, and methodology to sustain a competitive advantage. The health sector has not been left behind. Specifically, this sector has institutionalized an effective interaction strategy for the elements of quality, cost and delivery (QCD). In application, the concept of QCD integrates three separate elements of cost, quality and delivery in an interrelated manner. The element of quality in the QCD mix refers to the quality of services or products or the process involved in delivering the service. For instance, in a typical hospital setting, quality runs through design, production, developing, and servicing the service charters (Miller et al. 31).
The aspect of cost management involves streamlining the operational processes to ensure that they are sustainable and cost-effective (Seddon 23). Lastly, the deliverables are performance indicators measuring the time and volume of service at any given period (Willis 45). This paper presents a comprehensive quality improvement at the XYZ hospital through the application of QCD to manage the materials, machines, manpower, environment, measurement, and method. The report is focused on functionality dimension in the quality management process to balance the costing implications for delivering the key performance indicators. The proposed report reviews the rationale for each proposal on the basis of the Gemba QCD framework.
Current QCD Value Chain at XYZ Hospital
The values of the XYZ Hospital operate on the three building blocks of learning consisting of a supportive learning environment, concrete learning processes, and practices leadership that reinforce quality assurance. The executive board is expected to play a significant role in setting up the learning environment for the employees (Miller et al. 32). This culture is meant to create an ideal climate for quality performance and communication among the employees. The XYZ Hospital’s teamwork culture spells the rules of engagement and expected performance of the employees and other departments within the hospital as part of the value chain. These rules appreciate diversity and uphold integrity in judgment as enshrined in the hospital’s vision and mission statement. Generally, the XYZ Hospital is committed to compliance and adoption of standard healthcare practices through the actions of the board of directors in managing hospital functions and stakeholder interests.
The value chain also operates within the objective of providing sufficient information on the real management goals that facilitate the occurrence of good governance as a result of strategic business planning. This objective substantiates differences between management, employee behaviour, and professionalism in monitoring control system in the best interests of the shareholders and other stakeholders. Thus, the plan execution team must use this information in improving monitoring systems and inclusive structuring as the region may demand healthcare services (Coimbra 19). A well-structured value statement consists of expertise mandated with the responsibility of systematic knowledge gathering from which testable and definite condensed results are achievable. In relation to the XYZ Hospital, the expert role is provided by the planning team on behalf of the board of directors, which represents the interests of the shareholders (Mann 12). In order to enhance the achievement of the same, the board of directors manages several internal control policies that create consistency and healthcare sustainability as part of the XYZ Hospital functioning module.
Despite the dynamics in the healthcare provision environment, XYZ Hospital has structures and systems to ensure that corporate governance is ideal and flexible enough to manage the proposed strategic plan. Therefore, the proposed three-year strategic plan has been created to balance the pillars of mission, vision, and the current goals towards quality healthcare services delivery (Coimbra 19). The proposed quality values and critical objectives for the three-year strategic plan are summarised below.
- Excellent and quality healthcare services
- Expertise and professional approach to service provision
- Recruitment of the best service providers
- Collaboration, training, and promotion of proactive teamwork
- Provision of sufficient resources for the provision of healthcare services
- Proper treatment of the clients
- Provision of customized health services to each segment of clients
- Creation of a holistic healthcare environment
- Implementing the best human resource management practices to ensure service care sustainability
- Continuous process evaluation to ensure optimal performance of all department at the hospital
Strategic Objectives Focus Areas
Six areas were noted as critical in the successful creating of a sustainable and quality healthcare environment in the proposed hospital for the next decade. Each element or area of focus is aligned to a specific objective that will form the blueprint for evaluating its success at the end of the three-year period. Each objective was created with a clear rationale for the section to ensure that the aspect of focus and realistic implementation is achievable. Besides, the objectives can be quantified and tested for their appropriateness and level of implementation. The strategic objectives are expanded below for each of the identified areas of focus in the three-year quality performance plan.
Materials
The quality healthcare services will be provided in the most professional manner and in the friendliest environment to address the needs of each patient. The services will operate within the customer centricity model to create the ideal healthcare service environment. The proposed hospital plans to provide customized health services to patients across the region of operations and beyond. Currently, there is a gap in health care provision since the population within the targeted region is not efficiently serviced by healthcare centres. The primary focus of the proposed hospital is the provision of quality healthcare services to residents of the targeted region since the hospitals within the region cannot meet the current demand. Therefore, the creation of structures to deliver quality health services will not only ensure that the operations at the hospital are sustainable but also accessible by a population of more than 20,000 people.
The key to sustainable operations and implementation success of the proposed hospital will depend on the ability to create customized healthcare services to address the needs of each targeted client. The hospital will be divided into subsections that offer technical support in the form of the computer-based patient record (CPR), health information systems (HIS), telemedicine, and other technical aspects of information management. The health informatics support services that will be offered by the hospital will have a series of different computer-based patient record management systems for inpatients and outpatients. Besides, the hospital information system will manage medical devices, telemedicine services, scheduling, and billing (Hariharan 34). Therefore, the proposed hospital will continuously strive to systematically improve the scope and nature of each healthcare service it provides.
Machine
The primary and secondary demands of each patient will be addressed in the most professional and timely manner to ensure that the health environment is not only friendly but also promoting equitability and proactive patient-personnel interaction. The proposed patient-centricity approach will encompass proactive communication channel building to ensure that the process of encoding and decoding information when interacting with each patient promote confidentiality and friendly interaction. Basically, this objective will operate on the pillar of equality in handling the concerns of all patients such as first-come-first-serve policy, follow-up on previous treatment, and provision of accurate information to all patients (Hariharan 23).
The health institution is aware of the significance of the patient in the healthcare provision environment since the hospital would be nonexistent if there are no patients. Therefore, it is our primary role to ensure that the patients are made to feel as comfortable as possible to make the patient-personnel interaction healthy. The hospital will oversee long term services focused on improving the scheme for managing patient records and other health information systems. Before administering every form of treatment, the consent of the patient and openness will be activated through proper and professional interaction. This strategy is aimed at balancing any cultural concerns of the targeted patients (Coimbra 35).
Manpower
The primary goal in employee performance management is the proper motivation of our personnel to ensure that their physical and psychological work environment is friendly to their needs when serving patients. The hospital has endeavoured to create an ideal work environment that promotes employee development and growth through structured promotion and monetary rewards. Creating an ideal work environment is our key priority. In the health sector, the performance and conduct of the employees are very important since they have an impact on the patient’s health and lives. In addition, the principal challenge in the health care sector is the implementation of the processes that ensures that conflicts are managed in a fair and just manner (Mann 54). As an institution that aims to be the regional leader in employee satisfaction, we have laid down strategies to ensure that the employees are motivated, well trained, and constantly rewarded. The overall well being of our employees is affected by numerous factors, which include intricate and multidimensional family demands, transport systems, economic demands, societal changes, and technological demands among others (Hariharan 42). Fortunately, we have systems and packages that address these demands.
The input of our personnel cannot be matched to any other thing. The team’s level of motivation and general satisfaction determine every level of success of the hospital since they are the implementers of every quality performance policy. Our well defined and implemented policies ensure timely reward and motivation among the healthcare workers. These policies provide a proactive and steady response, encourage open communication, and support all-inclusive problem solving as a means of ensuring optimal employee performance. The employee training programs within the hospital should be able to develop and operate solutions that incorporate data from a wide range of sources and technology to effectively provide ideal services to clients (Willis 33). When the system functions within accepted parameters, employees will eventually develop a self-consciousness to deliver quality services and defend the XYZ Hospital as part of a family.
Environment
The current organizational climate is aligned to quality performance through corporate governance, quality improvement channels, internal controls, and proactive leadership structures to micromanage the performance and growth of each department. Total quality management is critical in monitoring the efficiency and proactive organizational culture in line with the objective, goals, and mission of an organization. Quality improvement facilitates sustainable and optimal use of resources in service delivery (Willis 33). Organizations function best when the intra and inter performance systems are perfect. Therefore, successful organizations manage information continuously.
The practice of proactive management involves the science of processing information to facilitate informed decision making among managers. In the case of XYZ Hospital, the performance tracking system will be implemented to guarantee organization effectiveness. Reflectively, the system offers the opportunity for the XYZ Hospital to fill the vacuum that often exists between company actions and strategies adopted (Mann 28). At the same time, the system engages a multi-faceted user board in planning for the immediate, midterm and long term strategies. Also, the system has application for tracking feedback against the progress of each strategy and records any changes in the dynamic healthcare environment (Hariharan 46). Thus, the performance tracking system is a necessary tool for a systematic evaluation of the strategies in place at the XYZ Hospital against future focus in order to successfully translate the strategies into deliverable variables that can be quantified (Bremer 64).
The performance management system is a process of fostering development within the organization setups through the adoption of a cycle of well-planned intervention approaches aimed at enhancing the general efficiency of an organization, and at the same time bettering the positions of a majority of its members (Bremer 62). Specifically, a good working environment should be flexible, relevant, and comfortable within set measurement standards that support the intrinsic and extrinsic relationship between an organization and different performance systems (Ahlstrom 31). There are laid down structures at the XYZ Hospital formulated to keep staff in healthy and stable mind in their duty of serving the interests of an organization through regulatory ethical communication models. Organizational behaviour at the XYZ Hospital is aligned within four models (Mann 19). These models are the motivation to acquire, bond, comprehend, and defend. Besides, the hospital has a strategic leadership management system which ensures that managers are periodically trained in the ideal organizational leadership skills to foster proactive performance (Willis 39). The hospital will put out most of the documents such as policies, procedure manuals, and new rules through the intranet web pages. This will save XYZ Hospital costs relating to printing, maintaining and circulating such documents. Also, an intranet makes it easier for communication across the organization.
Measurement
The hospital will strive to develop critical networking partnerships with the local healthcare organizations, government agencies, and hospitals to ensure that best practices are borrowed or exchanged in s structured manner. These alliances will make the referrals and consultations easy to act on since the health facility will be functioning as a healthcare partner with other providers. A networking system is a complex association comprising of suppliers, healthcare providers, and other players that function within the healthcare industry. The system includes direct players such the XYZ Hospital, independent entities such as business associations or regulatory agencies providing healthcare support.
The XYZ Hospital will implement the networking system as basically aimed at making an improvement to the general state of relationships between its service provision charter and that of the local healthcare agencies (Bremer 42). To attain this, the XYZ Hospital will appoint a network building team comprising of four persons to create a proactive relationship with other local healthcare providers. Since XYZ Hospital will be the only healthcare centre in the region that offers specialized cancer therapy and treatment services, it is necessary to strengthen the partnership bond with the local healthcare organization (Mann 14). In the third year of the execution of the proposed plan, XYZ Hospital will partner with the local home-based cancer care organization to provide free cancer care training as part of its corporate social responsibility initiative.
Method
The plan will ensure that the services at the hospital are offered in the most professional and satisfying way to all the stakeholders such as suppliers, logistics support, patients, and the local community. Implementation of the expertise service strategy is a systematic measure that is instituted by an organization in order to maintain an efficient and effective operation matrix. Therefore, it is important to have effective service delivery standards for controls within the XYZ Hospital to ensure efficiency (Ahlstrom 44).
Apparently, the benchmarking initiative for expertise service delivery involves streamlining service charter to ensure efficiency via a proactive quality mitigation channel, which reports the progress of the intended quality improvement system. We will aspire to achieve efficiency in the chain of command between output and customer satisfaction. Since the scope of quality is universal across different sizes of businesses, implementation of total quality management at the XYZ Hospital cannot change, rather, it will only be modified to fit within different services that are demanded by the clients (Ahlstrom 32). The continuum of increasing the value of quality in operations at the XYZ Hospital will lie in data, information, and knowledge. Based on the credo emphasis, it will stress on ethical behaviour and customer satisfaction within accepted standards as part of the expertise input in offering treatment services. The moral obligation will be in the forefront while the stakeholders at the bottom of the triangle (Willis 19). The value structure will be supported by a decentralized decision support system.
Conclusion
As a strategy of managing the rising need for healthcare services, the proposed QCD management is an uphill task of reviewing critical health improvement needs in order to create a strategic plan for managing costs, quality, and deliverables in the proposed six areas. The plan aims at addressing the current health needs with the intention of making improvement to the service charter to cater for the growing population of those in need of improved healthcare services. Therefore, the proposed improvement in the current service charter reflects the current population growth rate and general development against the hospital capacity and optimal strategies for effective resource utilization. In order to come up with this strategic plan, there will be a series of intense and strategic meetings among the stakeholders as a strategy for creating a dynamic and flexible plan within the best interests of local leaders and residents. In the discussions, the planning and execution processes are specific to the goals, mission, and values of the strategic plan as a prerequisite for guided and quantifiable development schedule. The focus of the critical planning was aligned to manage the materials, machines, manpower, environment, measurement, and method as part of the service charter at the XYZ Hospital.
Works Cited
Ahlstrom, Joakim. How to Succeed with Continuous Improvement: A Primer for Becoming the Best in the World. McGraw-Hill Education, 2014.
Bremer, Michael. How to Do a Gemba Walk: Walk with a Purpose. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016.
Coimbra, Euclides. Kaizen in Logistics and Supply Chains. McGraw Hill Professional, 2013.
Hariharan, Arun. Continuous Permanent Improvement. ASQ Quality Press, 2014.
Mann, David. Creating a Lean Culture: Tools to Sustain Lean Conversions. 3rd ed., CRC Press, 2014.
Miller, Jon, et al. Creating a Kaizen Culture: Align the Organization, Achieve Breakthrough Results, and Sustain the Gains. McGraw Hill Professional, 2013.
Seddon, John. Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service. CRC Press, 2013.
Willis, Drew. Process Implementation through 5S: Laying the Foundation for Lean. CRC Press, 2016.