In the market of healthcare services, gaining a competitive advantage is vital for any clinic. For the purpose of growing and attracting new clients, managers are involved in creating different strategies and solving problems (Johnson et al., 2017). Furthermore, scholars believe that organizations are now forced to “the new processes of innovativeness in both private and public sector” (Çınar and Eren 2015, 253). In this particular case, the hospital applied a methodology to improve patient flow (NHS, 2017). There is no doubt that this implementation is valuable for service development because reducing the length of patient stay is one of the essential challenges that many medical facilities face. As researchers state, the lack of resources or renovations to make it possible is concerns many of the staff (Ginter, Duncan, and Swayne 2018). Therefore, this issue could not be considered a rare one. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to overestimate its worth since a change in this area can also positively influence other systems in the hospital.
It is evident that this initiative has a number of advantages, which have been demonstrated several months after the innovation. First of all, patients now have constant access to healthcare because of the on-call night duty team. In this way, it became possible to manage patients out of working hours. One of the drawbacks of this redesign is that new staff roles may be confusing to nurses, and it requires time and education to learn to utilize the new methodology. However, improving patient flow and supporting nurses in their discharge decisions reduces job stress, which is also important for creating a competitive advantage (Alipour and Monfared 2015). The patient’s length of stay is unpredictable because there are many factors that can influence their admission. Nevertheless, understanding variation in this matter is significant because it allows management to see causes, patterns, and create methods to reduce them.
Reference List
Alipour, F. and Kamaee Monfared, M., 2015. Examining the relationship between job stress and organizational commitment among nurses of hospitals. Journal of Patient Safety & Quality Improvement, 3(4), pp.277-280.
Çınar, F. and Eren, E., 2015. Organizational learning capacity impact on sustainable innovation: The case of public hospitals. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 181, pp.251-260.
Ginter, P.M., Duncan, W.J. and Swayne, L.E., 2018. The strategic management of health care organizations. John Wiley & Sons.
Johnson, G., Whittington, R., Scholes, K., Angwin, D.N. and Regnér, P., 2017. Exploring strategy (No. 11th e). Pearson.
NHS. 2017. ‘Managing Variations in Patient Discharge’. In Improving Patient Flow in the NHS – Case Studies on Reducing Delays. 75-77.