The chief nursing officer’s crucial responsibility is to make the organization’s operations cost-efficient and to maintain all staff involved and motivated to provide high-quality healthcare. Departments merging is an appropriate practice to optimize clinical processes as the new unit can become a valuable economic revenue saver. The financial aspect is critical for any healthcare organization because it influences employees’ satisfaction, patient outcomes, prices, and quality of services (House et al., 2022). The problem with such changes is different managers are in overlapping positions, and cutting the workforce is not an option because of the quotas presented by the local administration and executive board. For instance, social work, utilization review, and discharge planning departments are separate teams with separate tasks, leaders, and practitioners; however, merging them benefits clinical operations cost reduction. Consequently, a successful nursing officer should develop a program that saves workplaces and optimizes processes, considering employees’ engagement and financial needs. This paper aims to describe and outline how to merge social work, discharge planning, and utilization review departments maintaining fiscal focus and maximizing staff members’ satisfaction.
Strategic Questions and Issues of Financial Resource Management
The successful merging strategy should aim to save each department’s key responsibilities and tasks and allow them to interconnect and assist each other in their daily operations. Thus, the key strategic question is how to enable social work staff members to reconsider their work to integrate with discharge planning and utilization review employees without assigning more hours or switching positions. To avoid issues, financial recourse management decision-making should focus on reducing operations costs by decreasing the need for tools or services rather than cutting salaries (Nundoochan, 2020). Another strategic question is how the daily operations may be modified for the employees to work as the same unit with centralized leadership and administration practices. Departments interact with clients throughout their hospital stay: social work assesses new patients during admission, utilization review identifies if the treatment was correctly selected, and discharge planning educates them about post-hospitalization before leaving. The financial management issue is that merging may eliminate the need for separate audits, making responsible staff members lose their payouts for this task.
Maintaining Human Needs of The Staff Members
The merging of three departments is a massive update in a healthcare organization’s daily operations, impacting the involved employees the most. It is essential for the chief nursing officer to maintain their human needs at an appropriate level or even provide them with better conditions. Maslow’s Pyramid suggests that individuals should live and work where their physical necessities, safety, esteem, belonging, and self-realization are addressed to be motivated and satisfied (Eliyana et al., 2020). Departments’ mergers will not threaten the basic needs because staff members will stay in secure and well-developed working conditions. However, the changes might disrupt employees’ sense of being valued in a team and space to actualize themselves. Consequently, human needs maintenance should include team-building events, meetings where opinions can be shared, and appropriate rewarding practices (House et al., 2022). For instance, each department’s members who directly interact with clients may discuss their work, share ideas, and develop best practices together. Such collaboration will address their needs for being valued, belonging, and self-realization.
Moreover, human needs maintenance can be addressed by the leadership and chief nursing officer’s openness to feedback and willingness to consider it during and after the merger. Indeed, when staff members are offered to influence the outcomes of changes actively, they feel valued, and the new team can be formed more effectively (Cerezo-Espinosa de Los Monteros et al., 2021). Moderating if the basic needs are addressed is not complicated because most workers reach out to their leaders or union representatives if they feel their workplace well-being is threatened.
Ensuring All The Staff Members Engage Fully in The Merger
Staff members’ engagement in the departments’ merger is essential for its efficiency and working tasks’ optimization. As no one loses their role as social work, utilization review, and discharge planning teams unite, it is crucial to locate the similarities in their daily operations (Eliyana et al., 2020). Then, engagement of all staff members may be achieved by making them offer their ideas on eliminating repeating the same tasks and what recourses are necessary for progress. Professionals are the most experienced, and letting them execute is appropriate, cost-efficient, and ensures they are engaged in the merger (House et al., 2022). For instance, practitioners of each department perform patient assessments and ask the same questions, while they may develop an accessible database through which the discharge planning member may access what their social work gathered. Such collaboration saves time and encourages the new team to optimize their daily operations and help one another. Staff members’ engagement can also be ensured by communicating the need for combined attempts to build a department where every member has sufficient sources.
Ensuring All The Staff Members Feel Good about The Merger
Considering how staff members of the uniting departments feel about the merger is essential for chief nursing officers and involved leaders because it helps address the risks of turnovers or conflicts in the new team. The primary aspect that needs to be discussed is each person’s role justification in the financial part as ensuring everyone that their salaries are not affected improves their feeling about the changes. Furthermore, with the organization’s approval, additional bonus options may be offered to encourage members to set and achieve goals as a new team (Cerezo-Espinosa de Los Monteros et al., 2021). For instance, their interventions to reduce costs without losing the services’ quality would become long-term benefits for all organizations, justifying the price of bonuses. Merging departments is frequently perceived as a downgrading experience for staff members or as decreasing their chances of building successful careers in the organization. Consequently, finding time for a one-on-one session for each practitioner to discuss their thoughts and expectations is time-consuming yet critical for the chief nursing officer.
Maintaining The Fiscal Focus of The Merger
The initial need for merging social work, utilization review, and discharge planning departments were focused on the fiscal value of decreasing the number of separate units in the organization. To maintain focus on this aspect, every idea the team offers throughout the operations update must be evaluated in terms of revenue and cost efficiency (Nundoochan, 2020). For example, when merged, audit tasks for patient management will cost less for the organization to perform. Moreover, the new team should develop a well-structured plan with their most expensive operations to help the chief nursing officer compare the costs with previous conditions and forecast revenues, risks, and opportunities.
Conclusion
Merging three departments is a crucial step in operations optimization for a healthcare organization, and its success depends on how the teams react and deal with the significant changes in their work. The chief nursing officer must ensure that staff members are satisfied with the new conditions, understand the reasons for uniting and be aware of new opportunities to improve patient outcomes and service quality. An effective merger cannot be performed without collaboration with all participants, one-on-one sessions, and adjusting the initial goals to the needs of staff members. Financial management should be based on optimizing the operations for cost reduction rather than affecting salaries or bonuses.
References
Cerezo-Espinosa de los Monteros, J., Castro-Torres, A., Gómez-Salgado, J., Fagundo-Rivera, J., Gómez-Salgado, C., & Coronado-Vázquez, V. (2021). Administration of strategic agreements in public hospitals: Considerations to enhance the quality and sustainability of mergers and acquisitions.International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(8), 4051.
Eliyana, A., Permana Emur, A., & Sridadi, A. R. (2020). Building nurses’ organizational commitment by providing good quality of work life.Systematic Reviews in Pharmacy, 11(4).
House, S., Wilmoth, M., & Stucky, C. (2022). Relational coordination is a merger and acquisition framework for healthcare organizations. Nursing Management, 53(2), 36-42.
Nundoochan, A. (2020). Improving public hospital efficiency and fiscal space implications: The case of Mauritius. International Journal for Equity in Health, 19(1), 1-16.