Change and Change Management in Health Care

Change and Change Management in Health Care

Introduction

Change is an ever-present feature of organizational life, and today organizations are facing a more rapidly changing environment. Modern organizations demand change managers to evaluate, recreate, and continue applying improvement initiatives including process redesigns, technology upgrades, value added activity assessments, employee empowerment efforts, and total quality management. One of the seminal forces in organizational change management was proposed by Kurt Lewin, who theorized that change involves a series of distinct, structured processes aimed at empowering individuals to accept that change is needed and must be embraced and maintained (Davidson, 2010).

Change Management in Health Care

Increasingly, the healthcare sector is concerned with improving healthcare quality, and performance efficiency and effectiveness through structural reforms, financial considerations, procedural reforms, cultural change, etc. Longenecker and Brown suggest that to accelerate and sustain change, systematic management-development efforts must be demonstrated at the organizational level. This, however, burdens individual managers. Ubeda and Santos note that competence-based management is needed under these circumstances. This requires the development of human competences through efficient staff selection, performance appraisals, career management, and other motivational practices that allow the entire staff to develop and assimilate their skills, knowledge, and behaviors (Garson, 2000).

The quality of the health care and the care given to patients are one of the most significant issues in the health care system. The increasing demand for the high quality health care and the vision of the health institutes to provide high quality health care has lead to the transformations and changes in the methods of the health care with many respects. The hospitals and clinics are undergoing several different changes in their systems with various aspects such as changes in structures, staffing, training, tactics and other related areas in order to evaluate and to provide a good quality health care to the citizens (Ubeda & Santos, 2009).



Change in Staffing Practices

At its simplest level, this means teams function better than individuals. In health care, the makeup of those teams often takes on a traditional appearance. It also ensures that professionals do not fall into the trap of designing services for themselves, thereby creating a service gap. Under the consideration of this approach, the model of health care delivery, which entails the patients, centered care is not only restricted to the care given to the patients but also to the team and the employees who provide the care services to the patients (Colla, 2005).

Also, there is a considerable difference needed to raise the motivation level of the employees and the team members in order to improve the quality of the health care services. The change includes in it the tailored ways of providing the actual services to the customers. The change that is required includes some significant steps in it which should be considered for the smooth implementation of change and for the improved quality of the care services provided to the patients (Grol, 2003).

Energy Conservation of Employees

Organizations around the world employ a wide-range ...