Hospital for Special Surgery: Continuing Challenges of

Hospital for Special Surgery: Continuing Challenges of Growth Any successful organization must meet the challenges of growing, that is, if it is to continue to be successful. This is true for the organization that we are focusing on for this exercise, the Hospital for Special Surgery. One of the greatest challenges in terms of both expansion and continuation of success is how to balance healthy, well-thought-out expansion against becoming over extending.

The Hospital for Special Surgery, again like other organizations, is subject to both internal and external influences and forces that can either support or disrupt the best-laid plans of managers. Good leaders of an organization try to foresee what forces may be harmful to the organization in the future and put into place defenses against them. So what are likely to be the most important and potentially damaging forces that the hospital will face in the future.

Bearing in mind that only hindsight is perfect, we can nonetheless make reasonable predictions. One of most likely external forces that will affect the hospital is the shortage of nurses that is affecting medical institutions across the country. Why there should be such a shortage -- one that is only growing worse -- has complex roots. One of these is that there is a shortage of nursing programs. Nursing is (of course) a skilled profession, as is teaching.

The skills required in nursing, however, are different from those required of a teacher, and until a large number of nurses are trained as teachers as well, there will continue to be a shortage of nursing programs. The other major reason for a nursing shortage is that the entire range of medical professions is now open to women.

The hospital can react to the nursing shortage in a number of ways, but the most straightforward one is probably simply to treat its nurses better than other hospital, a practice that should bring well-qualified nurses to the hospital and also encouraged them to stay. In other words, let the basic market forces work to give the hospital a competitive edge.

This approach can be initiated almost immediately and amended and continued for a number of years: Indeed it will probably have to be extended for longer than the three years that this assignment asks us to plan for, but it should certainly be put into place for at least three years. The same approach can and should be applied to other medical positions, including surgeons. The obvious response to a mid-range plan that will increase the hospital's costs is how it can sustain such a rise in.