The emergence of large not-for-profit healthcare networks across the US has contributed to the rapid development of various public health trends and overall improvement of health care in the country. According to Rapfogel and Gee (2021), the rapid development of nonprofit hospital networks may serve as a significant community health benefit due to the fact that these networks are not obligated to pay taxes, and all the donations and money collected could be allocated directly to the ways of benefiting the community. One of the most popular and commonly recognized nonprofit organizations in the US is the Dignity Health network. With the core belief of the company being embodied into the slogan “Hello humankindness,” Dignity Health operates in 21 US states and has an employee network of more than 60,000 people (“About us,” 2021). Hence, the organization itself is interested in promoting accessible health care to different community groups through free healthcare programs and fundraising events.
According to the 2019-2020 annual report, the Dignity Health network managed to collect nearly $3.5 million on health care. The aforementioned sum was subsequently allocated among such healthcare categories as COVID-19 support fund, maternity support, community research, education, and other (Dignity Health Foundation East Valley, 2020). In order to understand whether such a strategy is acceptable in terms of potential benefits for health care, it is necessary to look into the strategic directions outlined by the Healthy People (HP) 2030 initiative. Thus, according to HP 2030 (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion [ODPHP], n.d.), some of the leading health indicators for the community include medical insurance coverage, oral health, food security, vaccination, HIV awareness, and environmental factors.
However, when speaking of the overall pattern of securing positive community outcomes, the notion of disease and injury prevention should play a critical role (Mager & Moore, 2020). In the list of HP 2030 objectives, some of them explicitly relate to ideas of promoting education among adolescents, overweight people, and people with chronic conditions like diabetes (ODPHP, n.d.). Indeed, logically, the allocation of major resources to preventive education and community health promotion is prone to result in a decreased demand for further investment in programs addressing specific issues. For this reason, when speaking of Dignity Health, the amount of financial aid allocated to community education is significantly lower compared to the sums allocated for maternity support and COVID-19 (Dignity Health Foundation East Valley, 2020). Undeniably, these aspects are critical for healthcare as well, especially nowadays when people struggle with the pandemic, help inaccessibility, and school and kindergarten closure that contributed to women’s inability to combine raising children at home and having a full-time job.
Yet, the concept of education shall not be undermined in the given context. According to the scholarly evidence, the process of introducing community educational programs provides a positive correlation with the decrease in premature death rates (McCullough et al., 2018). Thus, taking this data into account, it may be concluded that as of today, Dignity Health is fairly successful in terms of meeting the health care needs of citizens n the next decade. However, more emphasis should be placed on population education.
In order to develop the framework of efficient health care provision by Dignity Health, it is of paramount importance to create a tangible development strategy. One of the primary issues related to the efficient management of a nonprofit healthcare organization is the communication between donors and customers. Indeed, organizations like Dignity Health are highly dependent on the partnerships made to meet the community’s needs, and their task is to deliver the problem statement to the potential investors in such a way that they will be willing to help resolve the issue. For this reason, the potential strategy of strengthening this empathetic link would be to incorporate customer departmentalization as an underlying basis for cooperation and organization. According to Grand Canyon University (2018), customer departmentalization stands for the teams’ division according to the customers’ needs. Indeed, when dealing with community health, the notion of personalized care should be of priority for any organization.
Dignity Care operates operating in many states and addresses both emergency funds, fundraising community events, and nonprofit hospitals across the US. Hence, the company may easily find itself in a situation where it would feel distant from its clients due to bureaucracy and organizational challenges related to running a nonprofit entity. For this reason, the reconsideration of organizational structure as a system of autonomous population segment-oriented departments will help establish the actual needs of patients in the next decade. Such a strategic plan may eventually contribute to the development of more departments and geographic expansion, as having team leaders in every organizational aspect may become an asset for finding local financial and community support. As far as the staff is concerned, emphasis should be placed on the recruitment of community health nurses who will eventually become public health advocates and promoters of a healthy lifestyle and demographic trends in each community. In such a way, the prioritization of preventive health endeavors would result in fewer disease instances across the community and, hence, better patient outcomes in the long term.
As far as the organizational culture of Dignity Health is concerned, it would be safe to assume that its approach to shared values and overall vision of health care is an absolute asset to its further development. Primarily, it is necessary to note that the organization is successful in terms of outlining the definitive mission and vision, securing proper team coordination, and shared leadership. Moreover, being a part of CommonSpirit Health, Dignity Health promotes the importance of shared values within the community, which means that both staff members and the overall population are equally responsible for educating others and bringing assistance and knowledge to the community (“Our history: Rooted in kindness,” n.d.). While beneficial, such an approach may have several implications in the long run, including the absence of the model of centralized leadership model of care and lack of responsibility placed on community health nurses. For this reason, it would be necessary to create a shared value roadmap that would differentiate between the values promoted by the community and public health nurses.
Considering the fact that Dignity Health is a nonprofit faith-based healthcare organization, the adoption of an open systems theory as a major driving force for its development is a beneficial long-term strategy. Fundamentally, an open system concerns the organizational model where an organization’s performance is closely related to the environment, public policies, and community, with every aspect being a stakeholder of a company (Grand Canyon University, 2018). Since the primary goal of the strategic plan for Dignity Health is to promote organizational autonomy and community education, the adoption of open systems theory will contribute to the cooperation with other public entities in meeting the established goals.
References
About us. (n.d.). Dignity Health. Web.
Dignity Health Foundation East Valley. 2019-2020 annual impact report. Web.
Grand Canyon University. (2018). Nursing leadership & management: Leading and serving [E-book]. Web.
Mager, N. D., & Moore, T. S. (2020). Healthy People 2030: Roadmap for public health for the next decade. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 84(11). Web.
McCullough, J. M., Singh, S. R., & Leider, J. P. (2019). The importance of governmental and nongovernmental investments in public health and social services for improving community health outcomes. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, 25(4), 348-356.
Office for Disease Prevention and Health Promotion [ODPHP]. (n.d.). Healthy People 2030. Web.
Our history: Rooted in kindness. (n.d.). Dignity Health. Web.
Rapfogel, N., & Gee, E. (2021). How nonprofit hospitals can support communities and advance public health. Web.