Assignment Help

NO APA FORMAT NEEDED FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT

Understanding the responsibility and concerns of healthcare is important in creating policies that leadership can use to streamline success. If strategic leadership is not realized over time,  healthcare organizations’ political influences may face challenges and create public disinterestedness in health policies.  These issues create restrictions  on the healthcare organization’s ability to meet its financial budget, gain community’s trust and involvement, and secure  political influence(s). This negatively impacts the overall performance of the healthcare organization. The ideas of process innovation, risk taking, health building analysis, and governance greatly impacts “sense-making” for those being led. These ideas bring understanding to the role of governance in the organization. Review the case study “Australian Surgery Indicator Makes the Front Page”
(ATTACHMENT INCLUDED)
and discuss the following questions in a 250 words:

· After your review, do the conclusions you draw from the case justify the headline? Why or why not?   

· Discuss the indications found in Table 15-1
(ATTACHMENT INCLUDED)
and their effect on the health care organizations efficiency in elective surgery.

· Evaluate the avoidable rate of canceled surgeries and develop an implementation plan to overcome the concerns.

· Develop a mini policy to address the issues between the doctors and the organization.

Reference for Case Study

McLaughlin, C. P., & McLaughlin, C. D. (2014). Health Policy Analysis: An interdisciplinary approach (2nd ed.). Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers. Print ISBN: 9781284037777.

experiences with their colleagues. Buttressed by the knowledge and skills
gained, they can gradually assume leadership based on competency and
commitment to personal and institutional change. One need not wait for a
senior management opening to put that new knowledge to use.

CONCLUSION
Professionals play a very important role in policy analysis; however, they
need to acquire those skills necessary to achieve positions of leadership in
health policy making. Professionals, especially physicians, must learn to
take a disinterested view in many of their interactions with others,
offsetting the growing public perception that they are much too concerned
with the monetary aspects of care. If they fail to do so, their professional
and political influence will continue to wane as their informational and
procedural monopolies weaken.

To start, professionals must begin to influence health policy locally.
They have to gain experience and leadership skills at that level before
moving up to higher levels. As they move up, they will learn about the
governance processes of both for-profit and nonprofit organizations and
the suitability of each for specific purposes. They will gain knowledge
about managing nonclinical types of risks in the health care setting and
about how to become a member of a team that can deal with the entire
medical condition rather than their subspecialty’s aspect of it.

Learning by doing is available in all settings, especially in training
newer health professionals, improving local care processes, and health
policy leadership at the community level. There is plenty of room for
professional leaders in the health policy process, if they are willing to
invest time and effort into learning to manage and lead in it.

Case 15 Australian Surgery Indicator Makes the Front
Page

The front page of the Sydney Morning Herald of February 28, 2011,
carried an exclusive headlined, “Thousands Hit as Hospitals Cancel
Surgery” (Wallace, 2011). It cited public records from NSW Health, the
ministry responsible for monitoring New South Wales’ state health
system. The records indicated that same-day surgery cancellations were
“occurring regularly at three times the accepted standard.” Many

451

patients showed up at public hospitals operated by area health services
expecting to go into the operating room, only to be sent home after
fasting and having blood samples sent to the lab. In many instances,
surgeries were canceled because the hospitals did not have beds waiting
for the patients after their surgeries.

The article noted that the ministry’s “Surgery Dashboard,” a
monthly snapshot of key performance indicators, sets a target of less
than 2% for surgery cancellations. This is a stretch or “aspirational”
goal, and some NSW hospitals were not meeting the previous standard
of less than 5%.

The Surgical Service Taskforce developed the dashboard, and NSW
Health incorporated it into its Pre-Procedure Preparation Toolkit, a
guideline issued by the ministry’s Health Service Performance
Improvement Branch. Table 15-1 lists the key performance indicators
for both state and local levels.

The guideline indicators and targets were reviewed in November
2012, and the canceled surgeries target remained unchanged.

The reporter interviewed the chair of the local Australian Medical
Association hospital practice committee, who was also a medical school
faculty member. He suggested that the problem was worse than
indicated, because patients who wanted surgery but were never booked
were not counted. He observed that the benchmark percentage was
“ambitious but clearly double or triple that figure is unacceptable.” He
called a ministry plan to add 400 public hospital beds per year
insufficient.

The deputy director-general of NSW Health told the reporter that
40–45% of the cancellations were for “patient reasons,” such as the
patient not showing up or being ill on the day of surgery. He also noted
that there were multiple reasons why hospitals could not accommodate
surgery patients—when trauma patients unexpectedly tied up ICU beds,
for example, or when necessary supplies and equipment were not
available. He noted that when the benchmark had been less than 5%
nearly all the hospitals had met it, so it was raised to an “aspirational”
level of less than 2% in 2007.

Data extracted from the monthly reports by the newspaper indicated
that some hospitals were usually failing to meet the less than 5% target

452

and few had come close to the less than 2% level on a consistent basis.
The same-day cancellation rate for six of the nine local hospitals was
around 4%. This suggests that almost 9,000 same-day surgeries are
canceled in New South Wales each year. The deputy observed that a
cancellation rate of 4–5% was typical of other Australian states and that
91% of elective surgeries were “completed on time.”
Table 15-1 Key Surgical Performance Indicators

State Level

Booked patient cancellations on the day of surgery for any reason < 2.0%

Patients canceled due to medical conditions (included above) < 1.0%

Suggested for Local Level

Patients through the preprocedure preparation process 100%

Percentage of patients processed by: Target locally determined

Telephone interview

General preadmission clinic

Multidisciplinary preadmission clinic

Average time spent by patient in preadmission clinic

General (anesthetist and nurse) 2 hours

Multidisciplinary 4 hours

Other

Patients who “do not attend” on the day of surgery < 0.5%

Source: Data from: NSW Department of Health, Guideline: Pre-Procedure Preparation Toolkit,
Document GL-2007_018, 02-Nov-2007, p. 18. Accessed December 9, 2013, at
www.health.nsw.gov.au/policies/gl/2007/pdf/GL2007_018

Discussion Questions
1. Do the conclusions you draw from the case justify the headline?

Why or why not?

2. Evaluate the indicators shown in Table 15-1. These are not the only
indicators. Others included the waiting times for elective surgery by
urgency category.

453

http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/policies/gl/2007/pdf/GL2007_018