A new Community Hospital in Norfolk was established in order to cater to the health needs of the community. The Hospital is made up of 250 beds and is equipped medical facilities to ensure efficient and effective delivery of service. The strategic initiatives of the Hospital are:
1. Develop a new prenatal center;
2. Expand the hospital’s ambulatory care presence in the secondary service areas;
3. Launch a hospital-wide cost containment program
4. Implement a medical staff development plan
5. Become an magnet Hospital
Prioritization
Prioritization of projects or tasks is important in order to ensure that the resources and time are used in a project that is expected to yield the greatest impact on the success of an endeavor. In the case, there are five different strategies but the resources and time are not enough to simultaneously implement these strategies. Prioritizing the project, which will have the greatest impact on the hospital, its people, and clients, is of utmost importance.
Decision-Making Tools to be Used
Discussed below are the decision-making tools that will be used in order to identify which among the strategies should be prioritized by the management team.
1. Multivoting
Multivoting is a useful tool in setting priorities. This is often use to systematically achieve consensus on a condensed list of important items. Multivoting or multiple voting is often employed in group decision-making. It is designed to reduce a long list of suggested actions or improvement priorities to a shorter list. It can be used after brainstorming sessions to narrow down the list of original ideas.
Multivoting will be used in order to identify which strategy should be prioritized. Each member of the management team will be given 5 votes which they can allocate to one or more strategies which he or she feels to be most important.
2. Prioritization Matrix
A prioritization matrix will help the Hospital define its clinical and operational goals and establish its priorities. It is a form of convergent thinking that is used to reduce the number of considered opportunities to a realistic, manageable size. Its purpose is to provide a structured, data-driven approach to determining what improvement opportunities are most likely to be successful and to affect the overall organization in a meaningful way. The matrix has three general components: (1) the issues or topics being considered, (2) the criteria used to prioritize the issues, and (3) the rating scores for each issue. Shown below is an example of a Prioritization Matrix
Initiatives
Criteria
Relation to Strategic Plan
Financial Impact
Positive Patient Impact
Organizational
Impact
Probability of Success
Total Score
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Rate each issue on each of the criteria using the scale of 0-5 (5 corresponds to having the greatest impact)
In identifying the priorities of the community hospital it is important gather suggestions from different people or groups. The strategic choice of the community hospital will affect various shareholders such as the management, the health workers working in the hospital, other employees, the patients and the community. Prioritization is a process whereby an individual or group places a number of items in rank order based on their perceived measured importance or significance.
Simplex Method
With the Simplex Method, group perceptions are obtained by the use of questionnaires. The method assists a decision-making group to analyze problems more efficiently. The answers to the questionnaires are scored and ranked and the issues with the highest scores are given the highest priority.
An added feature of the Simplex method is that particular problems can be given more weight, thus raising its priority level. However, this method relies heavily on the way in which the questionnaire presents the problems and questions. A customized exercise using the Simplex method follows this section.
Implementing the Simplex Method
1. Develop a Simplex Questionnaire. The questionnaire should have a series of questions about each particular option being prioritized. Closed-ended questions should be used rather than open-ended, due to the ease in comparing responses to closed-ended questions. The answer to each question should have a corresponding score with the higher scores reflecting a higher priority. While the questionnaire can ask as many questions as desired, fewer questions permit quicker responses and diminish the chance that questions overlap each other or cause other distortions.
2. Before the questionnaire is distributed, respondents need to understand the issues being presented, its impact, other information and data related to the problem, and potential interventions
3. Respondents then fill out the questionnaire.
4. Answers to the questions relating to each issue are averaged. The issues are then ranked in order, from most important to least important.
5. The issues, having been placed in rank order, can be selected in one of two ways: priority issues can be all those above a cutoff point or a specified number of the top issues can be selected.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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