Molly's Exploration of Health Management

Throughout class we have had guest speakers from a wide range of companies, big and small. In a management role, the same duties apply but there are definitely some differences. One of the main lessons I learned was that when placed in a smaller facility you acquire very personal relationships with all employees. It makes perfect sense because the lower amount of employees are the more time you get to spend with each employee. This can be a positive aspect and a negative one. In a positive outlook: more trust can be built, you get to know each person better which leads to seeing their strengths and weaknesses, and it can be easier to work with less people because there is less personalities. In a negative aspect: there are less people to share new ideas with, there is less room to work up in management roles, and projects within the organization might not be as large scale. I believe it depends on your personality to which organization is best. So far I have only worked in small scale ...

This post will be about the top most important actions to keep in mind as a manager. I am aware that at each facility there are different challenges faced, but I thought there had to be a common theme amongst facilities. After doing some research, I found a very interesting section of an online book called, "Transformational Leadership and Evidence-Based Management." In this section, after doing thorough research they found the most important management practices are, "   (1) balancing the tension between production efficiency and reliability (safety), (2) creating and sustaining trust throughout the organization, (3) actively managing the process of change, (4) involving workers in decision making pertaining to work design and work flow, and (5) using knowledge management practices to establish the organization as a “learning organization.” After learning much about healthcare management these practices don't surprise me as being the most important. However, I had...

Sorry about the lack of posts lately! I have been very busy with projects and exams as the semester is coming to an end. Even though this delayed my posts, one of the essays I was working on sparked a blog idea. A fellow HMP student and I wrote an essay on vaccine regulation. I learned a lot about how far vaccines have come from and where we are now. A common issue in this modern era is providing access. This got me thinking there must be a relationship between management and the development of vaccines. The main problem is there are so many new vaccines and higher standards of each due to our advancement in technology. This is generally a great thing, but it leads to higher costs and creates a bigger challenge in creating enough for a greater proportion of the population while at a fairly decent cost. To help this problem the Effective Vaccine Management Initiative was implemented. The EVM focuses on the lower income countries so they can support their own populations. They provide n...

Prior to todays class in management we were asked to read a chapter titled Marketing and Strategy from the book Reaching Excellence in Healthcare. I learned from this chapter that marketing is not just promotion and advertising, it is really about strategy. The text gave many different definitions to help grasp this concept. My favorite one is the mnemonic of the "Four Ps". Which consist of product, place, price, and promotion. These four P's really helped me understand what marketing really is. You have to really understand the product in the exchange, where should the exchange take place and how can we make it happen, how much will all this really cost, and what is required to get the word out and have stakeholders actually want it. After reading about marketing, listening to Prof. Bonicas lecture today, and hearing our guest speaker from Monday, I see a whole new career in marketing for myself. I want to learn more about it and what it really takes to have a career i...

Today in class we had a guest speaker come in from Elliot Hospital. She presented a whole new career in marketing to our class being the VP of Public Affairs and Marketing. The main focus of her presentation was crisis management. She talked about the crisis incident at Elliot when there was white powder in the air that caused 6 people to become ill. I learned a lot from this presentation because she went through the steps to take when a crisis such as a mysterious white powder causing illness occurs. She first said when your called into a crisis it is crucial to find out all the facts. The facts are very important because the more facts you know the quicker you can solve the crisis and facts can help calm the media down before they start to form their own misleading opinions. Another important step during a crisis is to contact your team. Its important to realize one person can't resolve the crisis by themselves, the more helpful people the better. So you call in employees who w...

After the events in New York City, when a man drove a truck into a bike path and killed eight people along with injuring 11 other people, it made me think about what hospitals do when there has been a terrorist attack. It must be a very fast paced environment for hospitals medical team and its managers to prepare for the consequences of a terrorist’s attack.             I can’t imagine how the staff must feel when treating a terrorist. There are most definitely a lot of morals that must be put aside in order to live up to their expectations within the organization. No matter who is injured, the emergency department must take action. In the case of NYC, the hospitals incident command team would be called upon and disaster plans would be put in place. Managers would have to take charge and enforce discharges from the hospitals, canceling elective surgeries and procedures, and discharging non life threatening cases.   These are...