Change Practice Implementing a Communication

Change Practice Implementing a Communication Plan at Jewish Home Lifecare: A Real-World Example of Organizational Change Jewish Home Lifecare is one of the leading provider of assisted living and healthcare services for the elderly Jewish community in the greater New York metropolitan area, with several campuses offering various levels and types of services to their clients. These services range from in-home care provision to 24-hour nursing care facilities for those requiring a greater level of assistance and healthcare.

Communication has always been a potential weakness for the organization given its size and the scope of its activities, and the organization has maintained an awareness of this potential weakness in its operations. Recently, a new formalized communication plan was established to ensure that all departments and campuses within the organization were communicating effectively and efficiently. Setting and Change Details The specific setting in which the change was observed by the author was the Manhattan campus of Jewish Home Lifecare.

This campus is the organization's primary long-term care facility, and provides a wide variety of short-term and daytime services as well. Specializations at the facility include Alzheimer's treatment and care, occupational, speech, and physical therapy for recovery from strokes as well as other injuries, and a variety of other symptom- and outcome-specific programs and services. Medical students in the Mount Sinai program are also trained on the site, adding a level of care and a level of complexity.

The change that was implemented took place across the entire organization, and consisted of designating specific individuals to be in charge of communication between similarly-focused departments at other campuses within the organization. These same individuals were responsible for communicating with a central communications officer (not a dedicated position, but a new specific responsibility for one member of the top-level administrative staff) at each campus, who was then able to coordinate communications within each individual campus as necessary.

Under the details of the change, officers also were to have regular meetings to ensure that knowledge was being shared effectively on an organization-wide basis, that various analogous departments at different campuses were functioning in the same basic manner, and that all activities supported each other and were supported by current knowledge and information. This was to boost efficiency and the quality of care.

Key Stakeholders Administrators at each of the organization's campuses and at throughout Jewish Home Lifecare were obviously key stakeholders, as their positions was on one hand made easier and more efficiently accomplishable with better information, while at the same time a great deal of the responsibility for the success of the change also lay with these administrators. The easing of many of their functions was offset by maintaining control and awareness of communications, especially for the communications officers designated at each campus.

The effects of this change on these stakeholders was increased control with increased responsibility. Other key stakeholders in the implemented change are the designated communications individuals designated in each department of the separate campuses, and the rest of the medical and support staff. The communications personnel clearly took on additional responsibilities due to this change, and they were also in a unique position to affect change in their departments and at their campuses from large-scale changes to recommendations of new best practices for specific issues or tasks.

Other medical and support personnel benefited from the changes in receiving more collaborative information and input, increasing the pace at which the quality of care improved and innovations were discovered. This created some additional burdens, as well, as there were more frequent updates to information and changes to practice that needed to be tracked, but this did not prove overly difficult.

Change Strategies Developing the design for the proposed change did not take a great deal of time; shortly after the need for a change was announced the plan for the designed change was distributed to the staff at all campuses of the organization. Actually managing this change proved more difficult than designing it, however, as might be expected.

The first strategy that was employed to implement and manage this change was to simply let the new communications network self-manage, with each of the designated communications individuals responsible for remaining up-to-date with each other. While each of these individuals did so in one manner of speaking or another, there was no consistency to the communications that took place. A project management planning system was then adopted as a means of making the change more consistent across all departments, individuals, and campuses.

As each relationship in the communication network was dependent on several others for efficacy and efficiency, there had to be some sort of codified an d regulated system. Communications individuals at the department level were responsible for coordinating group communication once every week, using conference calling and other technologies as necessary. Communications individuals at each department were also responsible for meeting with the communications officer at their campus one-on-one every week, and these officers held weekly meetings on Monday mornings.

This strategy of detailed management served the organization much better given the complexity of the communications networks and needs within the many parts of the Jewish Home Lifecare organization. Success in Implementation As noted above, the change in the communications plan at Jewish Home Lifecare did not meet with immediate success due to the lack of a true strategy for implementing this change. Even after the change was more comprehensively codified and rigidly designed, the project ran into some initial problems.

The fact that several departments at various campuses did not have exact analogues had required certain departments with only a subset of shared issues to become involved in each other direct communications networks, and certain individuals felt this led to a poor use of time when they had to hear about issues that did not effect them.

After several complaints in this regard, communications officers discussed the issue at their meeting and agreed that it truly was beneficial from their perspectives to have as much information about the goings-on of other departments as possible, and that even issues at one campus or department that seemed to be unrelated to the issues of another part of the organization almost always had points of overlap or useful comparison.

This was communicated to all members of the communication network established by the change, and once the full purpose and scope of the change was understood by all key stakeholders the change became highly successful. Information sharing between campuses and departments increased, and the quality of care as well as the consistency of the organization's responses and operations also became notably higher. This was commented upon by patients as well as staff, which was both intrinsically and extrinsically beneficial to the organization.

More Effective Management Despite the eventual success of the implemented change, there were many ways in which this implementation could have gone smoother and that the management of the change could have been more effective. Problems existed in the change management scheme from the very outset and the initial design process for the change, in addition to the.