Lifelong Learning Plan for a Healthcare Administrator

Lifelong Learning Plan
Mission
I have both personal and professional reasons for wanting to develop a lifelong learning plan. I am in Clarksville, TN, near the Army post at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and am currently a federal employee—but my goal is, upon completing my Master Degree in Health Care Administration, to work in the Army Substance Abuse program. This is my goal because in my childhood I saw my mother struggle with substance abuse and experienced what it is like to grow up in that kind of environment. While she struggled with addiction, my brothers and I bounced from post to post—there was a lot of instability and we all suffered as a result of it. I would like to run a facility where the children of such situations can reside with their sole custody parent. It would be a facility that holistically treats the addicted parent and helps with providing the stability needed to raise children at the same time.
The steps that I need to take to achieve this goal are to complete my Master Degree program and then move on to obtaining my PHD in Health Care Administration. This will help me to focus on the current and developing issues in both general management and health care administration. It will also help me to form good habits of staying up to date on current literature and evidence based practice in the field of management and administration as well as in healthcare advances in treating substance abuse clients and their providing supportive services for their families. I also want to practice more with holistic care and healing and integrative care wherein I work with other healthcare specialists to make sure all clients’ needs are being met. To do this, I will be pursuing a job in the Army Substance Abuse program and will express my desires to the administrator there to launch or take part in integrative care delivery.
Environment
 I plan on staying in the area as there is a lot of work to be done here in terms of facilitating and developing the Army Substance Abuse program and I have put down some roots here; however, I am willing to go wherever the Army needs me. Just working in the Substance Abuse program is the main thing and getting the permission and support to develop and launch the facility I have planned for families is the ultimate goal. The environment I see myself being involved in for the next ten years is thus one with structure and organization, which is how I see the Army.
Vision
Maxwell’s (1998) 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership will be the guiding the management book that provides the basis for my understanding/approaches as a manager. It looks at how to win over followers and identifies 21 specific factors that make great leaders. Some of it is ability, some of it is influence, some of it is the adherence to the process of development, and some of it is vision. A good point that Maxwell (1998) makes is that leaders have to be secure enough to give power to others. Leaders who are micro-managers will never succeed long term because they do not empower others but rather try to control them. That is not the recipe for a healthy, functioning team. Leaders aim instead to raise up other leaders. Leaders also get others to buy into them first and then they get them to buy into the vision. Finding a way to win, tapping into where the momentum is heading, prioritizing to make action meaningful and knowing when other actions are meaningless and wasteful—all these are qualities of a leader in Maxwell’s (1998) opinion, and none of them are wrong. Also, knowing when to lead and knowing how to lead followers as well as other leaders is essential to growth. True leadership is not something that can be contained in a simple statement or book. Leadership is complex and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to it (Northouse, 2016). As Stogdill (1948) notes there are many different personal factors that can be associated with leadership, from personality traits to background to experience and so on.
The guiding healthcare book that provides the basis for my understanding/approaches/actions in the health care arena will be Freeman’s (2001) book Substance Abuse Intervention, Prevention, Rehabilitation, and Systems Change: Helping Individuals, Families, and Groups to Empower Themselves. This book covers a lot of ground and goes over the different ways in which healthcare and social workers can better address the needs of individuals and families caught in the vortex of substance abuse and addiction.
Goals
My goal is to run a support facility for parents dealing with substance abuse. The facility will provide supportive services, such as transportation for school aged children to and from school and classes for the parent while the child is at school. Thus, while the children of these parents are learning, the parent will be attending classes, too, and the child will be dropped back off at the facility later in the day, at which time the parent will perform all the duties and roles expected of a parent. The goal of this program and facility will be to help the addicted parent in readjusting to being a parent who is hands-on and engaged in being there for the child and providing a stable environment for the child, i.e., making dinner, helping with homework, making sure the child is bathed and tucked in for bed, and all the basic operations of parenting. Because I grew up with a parent who was an addict, I saw how hard it is for children in such an environment. My mother struggled and I struggled, I fell in with the wrong crowd and I got pregnant at 15 years old. I have provided and been there for my child but it was not easy.
To accomplish this goal, my major goals are: 1) to continue my learning of and understanding in healthcare administration by completing my Master’s coursework, 2) to continue on with my education by pursuing and obtaining my Doctorate in healthcare administration, 3) to gain experience working in the Army Substance Abuse program, and 4) to mentor with other leaders who have either developed programs like the one I want to develop or who are interested in developing such programs. This latter goal will require networking and learning directly from other leaders by working under them and in a more informal environment than what one finds in a classroom setting.
Strategies
The specific things I need to work on to achieve each one of these goals is to maintain my balanced focus on life, work and family. Keeping this balance is crucial to advancing towards my goals. If I focus too much on one I will end up neglecting the others, and such neglect is a non-starter for me—so keeping the balance is crucial, and I will do that by communicating with my family members, with my colleagues at work and with my peers and instructors so that everyone knows what I am seeking to do and that if they see any issues with me I want them to communicate directly with me. It is important to get feedback from everyone that is in my life so that if they see any problems with what I am doing or with how I am meeting objectives it can be brought to my attention immediately and addressed. Communication is vital and necessary.
Second, I need to work on persevering towards my goals. Long-term goals require a total mental commitment and along the way obstacles will arise, so one has to be mentally, emotionally, socially and financially prepared to meet them. One practical way to persevere is to save each month so that one is not stressed about financial matters. Paying off bills on time and building up savings helps to alleviate a lot of stress. Another practical step is to structure my life around these goals so that I am not distracted by plans that take me away from them. Thus, when I think about plans for next summer or next fall, they will not include taking a cruise to Mexico but rather will include a class or two on healthcare administration so that I continue to advance along the path I have chosen.
Finally, staying in the right place mentally requires some mental and physical exercises. For me personally it is important to exercise routinely, meditate and pray. Prayer, meditation and exercise are great ways to keep one’s mind fresh, clear and positive. These are daily strategies that can be employed and that I am already working into my daily life, so it is just a matter of maintaining this routine and keeping the process going—30 minutes of low impact exercise each day (walking, bike riding, bowling or swimming), 15 minutes of meditation, and 15 minutes of prayer throughout the day.
Tactics
Creating a schedule or a calendar for daily routine activities will help me to keep my strategy of exercise, meditation and prayer in place. This is a visual way for me to see that I am keeping the schedule and it is a way to record whether I am staying on top of this strategy or not. I can cross off each day that I hit my mark and see what days are most problematic for me and why by comparing that day with the work or family or school schedule I had.
Paying off bills and saving money each month can be done by setting up a direct deposit from my checking into my savings account. I can send 10% of my check directly to my savings each week and this will give me the peace of mind and security I need to make sure I am financially able to meet my goals and reach the objectives I want to reach over the long-term. This is an easy way to establish a routine of saving.
The tactics for keeping a balanced life will be to communicate a message to my family, to my workplace and to my teachers and peers so that everyone is in the know about what I am doing. This is a simple step of reaching out and simply telling everyone who is a stakeholder in my life that I am moving forward with this program and that I intend to stick with it. It is a way of alerting them to the balance I want to maintain and that I intend to do all my duties as far as they are concerned and that I want to hear from them if they see me failing to uphold my end of the bargain whether it is at home, at work or at school. I can have a weekly check-up with my family, my colleagues at work, and my peers and teachers at school to make sure everything is proceeding according to the plan.
Monitoring
Monitoring these activities is important to see if I am succeeding and achieving at expected outcomes. This will come by way of weekly check-ups with stakeholders in my life as well as feedback that I am getting from others. I will also observe my own record keeping using the calendar and scheduling to see what is throwing me off. If I have too many classes or my workload is too much and I am not getting enough time in with my family then it will require an adjustment either with my strategies or tactics. I will assess the strategies to see if they are helping me to reach my objectives by giving myself a six month time frame of analysis and then analyzing the data with stakeholders to see what their interpretation is. If an adjustment is needed with tactics or strategies it will be made at that point.
Risk Factors
There are many risks associated but with wanting to have a goal of opening a facility like the one I have envisioned. It will require guidance and investment, and it will require evidence based practice to show that it is a feasible design. This means there needs to be studies that have been done that show how effective this sort of enterprise can be, but if this is the only facility like it then it will likely be the trial facility and will serve as a proof of concept. It could turn out that it does not work, but in science that is not necessarily a failure, it is simply evidence that can be used to develop a better model of care.
Risk factors in my own lifelong planning program consist of issues with family, work and school. External risk factors like the COVID-19 crisis have made everything harder for many people, and so there are a lot of new demands on everybody at this time. Families are home more and need more care, and some people are laid off work while others are overwhelmed as is the case in the healthcare industry. So there is a lot of compassion and care that is needed at this time.
Other risk factors include not having enough money saved up to prevent stress and worry about whether I can make it through all my schooling, or what the needs of my family might be. To mitigate this factor, I can start saving now and to mitigate against other issues I can start planning with my family so that we all know ahead of time what our needs are going to be in any given situation.
References
Freeman, E. (2001). Substance Abuse Intervention, Prevention, Rehabilitation, and Systems Change: Helping Individuals, Families, and Groups to Empower Themselves. Columbia University Press.
Maxwell, J. (1998). The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks: CA: Sage Publications.
Stogdill, R. M. (1948). Personal factors associated with leadership: A survey of the literature. Journal of Psychology, 25, 35–71.