HEALTHCARE

International Health Care Management

International Health Care Management

Introduction

CASE STUDY 1

As a team leader at a large teaching hospital of a busy ward, managing the patients and supervising their care is part of the job description. Having the responsibility of the morning shift, afternoon shift and the night shift means ensuring there is coordination and effective communication between all those who are part of these shifts. The patients require health services, which are available throughout the day, 24 hours, which include CT scans, X-rays and lab reports such as blood tests. During management of these three shifts it has been, noticed is that some of the messages are not being passed to the people they are meant for, be it patients, caretakers, doctors or the patients families. Relatives and patients have been complaining.

Communication Channels and Strategies

The manager of the ward has approached the team leaders and other personnel and asked to improve the current situation. To work on the communication channels and identify the barriers so they are, removed for effective and efficient communication. He has also asked to suggest strategies that are effective for better communication and should be, implemented.

Corporate communication promotes a strong corporate culture throughout an institute. It gives it a corporate identity, it provides reasonable and logical corporate philosophy, and it gives a sense of genuine corporate citizenship, enables a professional and appropriate ground to maintain a relationship with the press. It also provides for effective and responsible methods of communication during a crisis, it helps understand the tools and technologies of communication and introduces sophisticated and advanced methods to global communication.

Caring of patients at a hospital that works round the clock with caretakers, nurses, doctors etc. working in three shifts inevitably involves different individuals all of whom need to share the data and information of patients with each and discuss how they manage. Due to this, there has been more interest in the use of communication technologies and advancements in information technology for the support of health services (Sunyaev, A. et.al 2008).

They go as far as saying that correct information is healthcare systems lifeblood and the communication system is the pumping heart. While there is plenty of discussion of investing in information technology, the communication systems have always received lesser attention though they are just as important. There have been some crucial and significant research advancements in areas specifically like telemedicine, and there have been clinical adopting of much simpler services such as electronic and voice mail though they are not common in health care services yet. A lot would change only if people realized that the largest repository of information in healthcare lies on the heads of those individuals who work within it and the largest network of information is the extremely complex web of those conversations that are the link to the actions of these individuals (Harris MF, et.al 2002).

Channels have attributes such as noise and capacity, which are the determiners of how suitable a task ...