NURS 6241-3: Strategic Planning in Healthcare Organizations
NURS 6241-3: Strategic Planning in Healthcare Organizations
Readmission rates are often used as key quality indicators in healthcare delivery. Healthcare organizations endear to reduce the readmission rates to guarantee quality healthcare services. The value placed on reducing readmission rates can be reflected in the continued healthcare reforms, such as imposing financial penalties for healthcare institutions that register high readmission rates (Cakir & Gammon, 2010). Some of the intervention measures that organizations have recently employed to achieve this mandate include patient education, medication reconciliation, and timely outpatient appointments. The role of this task is to come up with a strategic plan defined by specific goals on how to reduce patient readmission rates.
Goals, Strategies and Objectives
Goals
The first goal is to ensure that in the next year, the rate of hospital readmissions, especially in the surgical and emergency care setting, has reduced by at least 50%.
The second goal is to ensure that future healthcare decisions are appropriately aligned with patients’ preferences.
Objectives
The first objective of setting these goals is to ensure an improved quality of care, as espoused in the received patient feedback survey. The second objective is to ensure that the rate of patient readmissions and subsequent deaths are reduced and that the healthcare facilities undertake patient-centered care.
Strategies
Many strategies will be implemented to ensure that patient readmissions have been reduced. The first one is to educate the healthcare team on the importance of reducing the risks of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). According to Spivack (2021), most of the readmission cases in healthcare facilities result from hospital-acquired diseases that can be reduced through basic practices like hand washing protocols and other hygiene practices. Therefore, educating and implementing hygiene management approaches will be an important way to help reduce patient readmission cases. The second strategy is to identify patients at high risk of readmissions. Some factors that increase patient readmission risk include old age, medications and their associated side effects, the current level of after-discharge support, and the history of readmissions. Having these aspects in mind helps to identify patients at high risk of readmission and subsequently give an individualized plan of care. Other strategies include being culturally sensitive and providing patient-centered healthcare interventions.
How Success will be Defined, Monitored and Evaluated
There are many ways through which the Success of the identified strategies will be defined, monitored, and evaluated. The first way is by assessing the competence level of healthcare providers before the education and training programs are implemented and after they are implemented (Gupta et al., 2019). The second way to define success is by looking at the number of patients that have been readmitted after a predetermined period. If the number of readmissions reduces within the set time, the intervention measures will be considered successful. Another way to Evaluate the Success of the intervention measures is by assessing the compliance rate and attitude that healthcare providers have in responding to the set healthcare policies meant to reduce hospital readmission rates.
The Needs of Relevance of Stakeholders
The highlighted goals, strategies and objectives cannot be attained without the help of stakeholders. Hospital readmission rate reduction can be attained better through the use of different stakeholders. For instance, to achieve targeted reduction rates, healthcare teams from different settings have to be involved. The collaborative approach can be achieved better when the stakeholders have a common goal which is to reduce the rate of hospital readmissions.
Core Team of Change
For change to be realized, internal and external stakeholders need to be involved in the strategy implementation process. The first category of internal stakeholders is healthcare providers, who should play a frontline role in ensuring that strategies such as education and sensitization mechanisms are adhered to. Healthcare providers should adhere to hygienic practices such as hand washing and patient-centered care, which are critical ways of reducing readmissions (Warchol, 2019). The second internal stakeholders are leaders in healthcare organizations. As vision carriers, leaders need to incorporate a culture of patient-centeredness, hygiene, and other policies that can help to reduce patient readmission rates. Similarly, patients themselves are part of internal stakeholders. They can help reduce readmissions by adhering to follow-ups and participating in the set healthcare plan.
Other than internal stakeholders, some external stakeholders are central to the implementation of a patient readmission reduction plan. The first external stakeholder is both the local, state and Federal governments. The Federal government, which advocates for the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, encourages hospitals to develop measures to reduce patient readmissions. The government was selected because it is a policy-making organ that sets the direction healthcare facilities must follow to achieve the readmission rate reduction targets. The government is also the driver of the set reform agenda through its incentive mechanisms. Another external stakeholder is the union which seeks to protect both patients and healthcare providers such as nurses. Both the government and nursing unions can work together to minimize the nursing staff shortage, which is a risk in the fight against reducing patient readmission rates.
The stakeholders will be involved in strategies by asking for their input and assessing the set standards in the fight against readmissions. Meetings, workshops, and other communication opportunities can help implement the selected strategies. One way to collaborate and communicate with stakeholders is by having joint strategic conferences and asking for their input in every decision made. Stakeholders can be motivated and engaged by receiving reports from time to time on the progress of the strategic plan. Asking for their information on the strategic plan is also another way to attract stakeholders to be part of the strategic plan.
NURS 6241-3: Strategic Planning in Healthcare Organizations
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