Leadership and resource management in healthcare organizations

¶ … Health Care

Leading people in a health care organization means to provide an environment where skilled professionals are empowered and motivated to provide the best care that they can. The industry employs a mix of highly-skilled professionals (physicians, nurses) and support staff, and it is imperative for patient outcomes that all of these employees are able to work to the best of their capabilities. Any health care organization will require a significant amount of interaction between different units, sometimes with conflicting objectives. This complexity makes leadership in health care challenging -- leaders need to view the organization as a machine and the parts of that machine need to work together well in order for the machine's outputs to be optimized (Plsek & Wilson, 2001).

Because there are many different units with any health care organizations, and most have some degree of specialized knowledge, there is a tendency to compartmentalize expertise. It is imperative, however, that the different components of the organization have trust in one another (Annison, 1998). One of the main roles of a leader is to foster that trust, so that the organization works efficiently and effectively towards common goals. Common goals and trust provide substantial motivation for health care workers. One of the elements of complexity for the leaders is to focus the different elements of the organization on disparate goals ranging from patient outcomes to profitability. That these goals sometimes seem to be mutually exclusive sometimes highlights the need for creativity in leadership, to find innovative solutions or empower the workforce to seek innovative solutions for themselves.

The staff is just one of the resources that must be managed by health care leaders. These staff members are a central resource that works with capital, equipment, time and knowledge to deliver patient outcomes and financial results (Treasure, 2001). A leader in a health care organization must be able to understand how all of these disparate resources work together to produce results, and then implement systems that allow for the optimization of all desired results.

In some respects, the challenges faced by leaders in health care organizations do not vary from those faced by leaders in other organizations. The balance between patient outcomes, the disparate groups of subject matter experts and the challenges presented by operating in a highly regulated and litigious industry, in addition to the life-and-death consequences of the organization's work highlight the need for unique leadership in health care. Resources are finite and fleeting, crises are manifold and constraints are many. The health care leader must have an acute sense of how to bring all of these different resources together -- this means having in-depth knowledge but also a feel for how all the pieces come together and how different changes will affect the organization's outcomes.