Comprehensive Health Care Organization Communication Essay

Health Care Organization Profile

Sunshine Medical Center or SMC is a community–based health organization providing hospital-based services and a number of complementing services.
Mission, Vision, Goals
The organization’s sole mission is to provide quality healthcare in an atmosphere of comfort, trust, and safety. The organization has a vision to be the leading community-based healthcare institution, regionally providing quality treatment and services. The institution has three key goals: to develop specialties to manage key referrals;fast track the inclusion of 50 more beds; and provide significant amenities.

Bed Number, Volumes

Sunshine Medical Center has a 350-ward bed capacity with outstanding facilities and quality nursing care. All these wards are under a Charge sister who is aided by nurses, intern nurses, and cleaning personnel.The volume of admissions to the hospital is approximated to be 34,000 annually with over 10,000 readmissions.

Type of Service Provided

The hospital’s services are categorized into outpatient and inpatient services. The services in general include antiretroviral therapy, general surgical, intensive care, laboratory services, obstetric and gynecological, and casualty services.

Quality Indicators

The quality indicators of the institution are based on occupancy, mortality rates, patient satisfaction, and staff professionalism.
Financial Performance Indicators
The financial indicators center on total operation margins, cash receipt to bad debt ratio, return on equity, days cash on hand, and days in net patient accounts receivable.In the macro level, researchers have seen other factors greatly affecting healthcare costs. These are the economic climate, government regulations, and business decisions. During the economic recession, the healthcare industry was also affected. The federal budget was threatened through the fast growth of healthcare programs such as the Medicare and Medicaid. These programs have a similar structure to insurances that have failed during the recession. When something goes wrong that these programs have to default in a sense, the federal budget may have to answer for the money loss. Thus, the government regulates transactions through legislations (Kliff, 2013).

Human Resource Challenges

The human resource challenges center on the number of nurses to patient ratio; the recruitment and retention of quality staff, and the intense pay reforms. Eighty-three countries are still beneath the basic threshold of 23 health professionals per 10,000 patients. Demanding work with relatively low pay is unsatisfactory. Thus, it sways health professionals to leave work (Thomas, Reddy, & Oliel, 2013).

Diversity Issues

The diversity issues covered in the hospital management are race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation.
Community Population Statistics
Community statistics show a populace of roughly 60, 000. It includes 35.3% comprising of the youth, 22.7% of children, and 20% of the old, from 45 to 65 years of age and 12% of the elderly from 65 to 80 years of age. The gender male to female ratio in the community is 49.1% to 50.9%.

Communication Plan

In order for the Sunshine Medical Center to effectively communicate its vision and mission in providing quality health care based on trust, comfort, and safety, our communication plan would include internal and external communication networks, stakeholder analysis, media methods, and various creative executions such as taglines.
First off, internal communication pertains to the exchanges of information among the people inside an organization. The external communication, on the other hand, occurs between the organization and the environment outside (Statewide Afterschool Networks, 2015). On the internal communication, the SMC would have a corporate website where employees would log in. With this, they could receive newsletters and participate in forum discussions. It would also serve as e-mail. On external communication, every execution through the customer relations of the employees would follow the three values of trust, comfort, and safety. Thus, these values must manifest through the services. For example, in the laboratory services, the SMC must make sure that health practitioners promptly tend to the patients. The waiting time for the patients must be only within 10 to 20 minutes. When health practitioners exceed this time and patients still wait to be accommodated, SMC must provide rewards ranging from freebies to discounts.
Next is the stakeholder analysis. It pertains to the systematic accumulation and analysis of qualitative information in determining the interest that must be prioritized when developing a program (Schmeer, n.d.).The most important aspect of the analysis is identifying the key stakeholders. For SMC, its stakeholders are the employees and the patients. Between these two, we infer that employees must be the priority. Such health care organization needs technical skills from its employees to continue the quality service that it promises for the patients.
The last aspects of the communication plan are the media methods and creative executions. The media methods and creative executions of SMC must bank on non-traditional media advertising since it is a community-based health organization where the scope of its accommodation is on local level rather than on a national level.Some examples may include the distribution of flyers; health care volunteers going around to personally communicate with the community members; and the conduct of community events such as symposia, free wellness checkups, and sports activities. Moreover, in order to highlight the three values of SMC, a more personal approach must be conducted such as the diagnostic interview between the health practitioner and the patient. We based this on the idea of the medium being the message (Durham &Kellner, 2006).

Marketing Plan

We would develop the marketing plan through a SWOT analysis together with the strategic goals. The strategic goals follow the three goals of the institution. These are to develop specialties, to manage key referrals, fast track the inclusion of 50 more beds, and to enable the provision of significant amenities. The strength of SMC includes the 350-ward bed capacity and its outstanding facilities and quality nursing care. There would also be an additional 50 beds to further accommodate the 34,000 admissions and 10, 000 in a year. Until then, SMC is limited through the current capacity. This may drag the establishment of a name for SMC.This is also the case in its services due to the struggle in human resource in relation to the patient ratio. The opportunities, on the other hand, can be found through the community statistics. It stated that most of the population composes of the youth. As for threats, SMC faces diversity issues such as race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation.
Based on this analysis, SMC may tap on the youth to establish its influence. This segment is where the succeeding generation of practitioners or at least health enthusiasts would come from. In order to reach out to them, we would hold health check-up missions across the community for a month. Also, there would be seminars and tie-up projects in schools.Other examples of events would be health-related contests and quiz bees. This would be carried out through the assistance of health practitioners including intern nurses and other personnel. The indicated marketing initiative would need a cross-functional team. This is because the health practitioners certainly would have to concentrate on conducting health procedures. Other departments such as the marketing and finance departments would have to mind the setting-up of the events. The marketing effort would be evaluated through the number of attendees in the events (Kelchner, 2015; Kotler& Armstrong, 2012).

Community Collaboration Plan

In connection to the marketing plan of tapping into the youth, the method of the community collaboration plan also leans towards instigating with the youth segment. When it comes to diversity issues, programs must target the youth since they are on the more serious part of the learning stage. With this, they would be more understanding of the values of varying cultures and circumstances (Werner, 2003).
For this plan, the goal would be to engage and educate at least half of the youth in the community about health care.This is to make the youth aware of the community’s circumstance on health. Other than the marketing efforts indicated in the previous section, this would be achieved through a mentoring system. It is where health practitioners, interns, students, and locals would be able to closely check patients’ health, learn technicalities, and gain experience. At the same time, each of these individuals would encounter unique struggles and lend appropriate solutions,given the patients’ varying backgrounds. With this, there would be room to settle the issue on diversity. As a more specific example, something akin to a “buddy system” may be adapted where healthcare volunteers are partnered with certain members of the youth in the community for a certain period of time. This would allow the youth to be mentored on health issues and to bond with the healthcare volunteers and professionals in the community; in turn fostering trust and cultural diversity.

References

Durham, M. G., &Kellner, D. M. (2006). Media and Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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Kliff, S. (2013). Here’s why health-care costs are slowing. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/22/heres-why- health-care-costs-are-slowing/
Kotler, P., & Armstrong, G. (2012). Principles of Marketing.New Jersey: Pearson
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Schmeer, K. (n.d.).Stakeholder analysis guidelines. Retrieved from http://www.eestum.eu/voorbeelden/Stakeholders_analysis_guidelines.pdf
Statewide Afterschool Networks. (2015). Internal and external communications.
Retrieved from http://www.statewideafterschoolnetworks.net/
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Thomas, G., Reddy, S., &Oliel, S. (2013).Global health workforce shortage to reach 12.9 million in coming decades.World Health Organization. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/health-workforce- shortage/en/
Werner, M. (2003). Addressing diversity: Making a difference in our communities.
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