Health Care Assignment: Strategic Plan for Gosford Private Hospital

Question

Task: You are to write a 1500-word health care assignment for an executive team of the chosen organization whereby you are attempting to convince that team of what you believe they should be doing over the next five years in an effort to be more successful.

You are required to develop a strategic plan that addresses the challenges and opportunities at a corporate and business level with a particular focus on strategies aligned with responding to the ongoing and future impacts of the current COVID19 crisis. In doing so, you must justify the strategy, using appropriate business examples and evaluating the approaches of competitors within the same segment. You will not be required to draft the strategic plan in full, as this assessment does not require functional-level implementation. Instead, students will need to develop key features of the proposal, including:

• A clear assessment of key strategic issues
• A vision and mission statement
• A proposal for an appropriate business model
• At least 5 strategic objectives in relation to the challenges and opportunities identified

Answer

1. Introductionto Health Care Assignment
In Australia's hospitality sector, organizations are required to develop a better strategic plan to identify their challenges and provide opportunities to sustain the opportunities. The current report is based on one healthcare center, Gosford Private Hospital in NSW, Australia. The present report aims to provide a strategic plan for the period of 2021-2026 to the hospital's executive panel. The main motive is to influence the hospital's management's decision-making process to do planning after the current Covid-19 crisis.

After the Covid-19 outbreak, the Australian government has responded to the GDP segregation and unemployment situation besides increased demand for the ICU beds, PPE kits, urgency in surgery, and PHI (Higginson et al., 2020, p. 488-502). It makes the private hospitals run out of the required capacity and made a haphazard strategic business structure. The current report will present other competitors' strategic approaches to compare, five different strategies to improve the current operation, and a proposed business model to sustain the process.

2. Strategic Issues Facing by Gosford Private Hospital, NSW, Australia
Gosford Private Hospital in New South Wales is known for providing high-quality surgical and medical services to provide better healthcare facilities to the people around the coast. It is regarded as the largest private healthcare center on the central coast. Gosford has an Endoscopy center, heart care center, private birthing cabins, a day surgery unit, 14 critical care beds, and several modern operating theaters. The hospital has more than 600 staff and engages with 200 certified doctors (gosfordprivate.com.au, 2021). Despite providing high-quality, effective services, the hospital suffer from some strategic issues after the Covid-19 outbreak.

2.1 Underdeveloped Website
During the Covid-19 situation, the demand for treatment and medicines has increased exponentially. It has happened that during the peak time, Gosford's website crashed for the enormous amount of traffic generation. Besides, the technical team at Gosford is not sufficient enough to manage a website in this volume.

2.2 Uneven Doctor and Patient Ratio
As a private hospital, the ratio between doctor and patient sometimes become hostile. It is happening that one single doctor treats more than 20 patients in a day. On the other hand, there is no permanent doctor in the hospital, making the time shift of different doctors confusing or sometimes delayed.

2.3 Lack in Revenue Generation
The moral ground of the private hospital makes their revenue generation system crucial. The Australian government is only responsible for providing 24% of the fund. The studies have been identified that private hospitals from different countries are engaged with non-governmental funding to achieve sustainability of their operations (Naus, Faint and Dwyer, 2018, p. 14). The lack of business generation during the Covid-19 situation makes the revenue system downward for Gosford.

2.4 Covid-19 Restrictions
After the Covid-19 outbreak, the private hospitals in Australia divided into different parts to treat Covid-19 patients. It also decreased the regular patients at Gosford drastically.

2.5 Conflicts between Leader and Management
In Gosford, the employees are frequently complaining about the management in sustaining a positive work environmentor providing salary within the current time. It makes Gosford experiencing employee turnover even during the crisis.

3. Strategic Approaches of Competitors

4. Proposed Business Model: The Product Leader
In the hospital sector, Product Leader is considered one of the significant business models in improving and sustaining a hospital operation. The Product Leader is mainly related to providing an advanced patient care system and achieving the best outcome. It is related to the high-quality and most advanced result, which is 'best-in-class' (Jacqueline, 2021). The sustainable competitive advantage is an essential factor in generating business innovations (Geissdoerfer, Vladimirova and Evans, 2018, p. 401-416). The current report proposes the Product Leader model to Gosford to achieve business objectives by prioritizing clinical models and cultures. The proposed business model will enhance the current operations.

Figure: The Product Leader Business Model (created by author)

Figure: Objectives for Gosford Private Hospital under the Product Leader Model (created by author)

5. Outlining the Strategy
5.1 Patient Satisfaction Strategy
The front desk of the hospital is important because they deal with the customer primarily. It is an essential part to obtain the potential patient's satisfaction in the hospital. It is a shallow cost strategy. The main aim of the mentioned strategy is to provide the patient with a proper hospital atmosphere and hygiene (Kash and McKahan, 2017, p 1-2). All the staff who is working under the front desk, cleaning department needs to be trained adequately.

5.2 Cost Reduction Strategy
Cost reduction strategy is another beneficial strategy to increase the hospital's reputation. Mainly the primary problem of the hospital is food. Proper dietary habits and food needs to be included in the food segment of the hospital. Reduction of cost can be managed by analyzing the essential element of poor health status (Padula and Delarmente, 2019, p 634-640). The hospital needs to include more resources in the operational and nutritional field of the hospital. It is essential to strategically analyze the various departments of the hospital and their expenditure.

5.3 Employee Engagement Strategy
Employees are the driving factor in any sector. So it is essential to make a proper strategy for employee engagement in the healthcare sector (Osborne and Hammoud, 2017, p 1-4). The Gosford Private Hospitalalso needs to reorganize its plan to manage and involve employees in various activities after the considerable loss created by Covid-19. The decrease in employee engagement immensely challenges healthcare enterprises to increase their productivity and cultural motivations.

5.4 Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategy is essential for Gosford Private Hospital. The emerging-market firms are focusing on internalization. Exporting can be the primary market mode to increase the profit rate of the hospital. Marketing plans and strategies have proven to be successful domestically (Samiee and Chirapanda, 2019, p 20-37). The Internet needs to be integrated with the exciting method booking services. The healthcare sector's changing environment needs to input various online services to keep its share in the market.

5.5 Leadership Strategy
Large healthcare enterprise like Gosford Private Hospitalrequires more than one leader to manage estimated 800 employees per day. The hospital has 600 staff and 200 credential doctors. The considerable workforce needs leaders who can effectively manage the whole healthcare system. It will be very effective and strategic to have at least four prominent leaders. Every department needs to be controlled by one specific person from each department. All of the sub-leaders will report to the four prominent leaders.

6. Strategic Objectives Related to the Challenges and Opportunities

• The above mentioned five strategies will be very effective for Gosford Private Hospital to implement. It will help them to overcome the crisis within the coming five years. Each process needs to be implementing for at least one year.
• The strategy will help Gosford Private Hospitalincrease financial growth by roughly an estimated $5million in the next five months.
• The strategy will give the organization annual financial growth of around 5.5% per year.
• The decrease of the financial expenses can be done by 3% with the proper application of the outlined strategies.
• The estimated challenges that can be faced by using the strategy are proper employee training depending on the department. Cultural differences that are present within the employee can be challenging to minimize. Staff rewarding and incentives record keeping will be very challenging.
• Healthcare is the most changing industry. During Covid-19, it faces the most challenges. Staff with low to moderate knowledge intensifies the work of the other employees. Teaching all the teams to adopt the best medical practices will be challenging for a large hospital like Gosford Private Hospital.
• Recruiting customer relationship managers will help the hospital manage the customer and staff by enlisting feedback.

7. Recommendation and Strategic Vision

• The branding of the healthcare operation needs to be consistent throughout the strategy implementing the process.
• The hospital needs to evaluate the patient's experience who uses an online platform to overcome their illnesses.
• The website of the organization needs to be exclusive and user friendly. The patient should get most of the advantages from visiting the organization's website.

8. Conclusion
Gosford Private Hospital also needs to reorganize and input several new tools to their websites. The website has to be user-friendly and easy to use.Various advantages like salary increment, wages, and incentives, insurance are the critical factors for the employees to work more efficiently. It also helps the Gosford Private Hospitalto earn more profit.The staff needs to be trained at least twice a month to increase their work efficiency with their changing needs. The website operation within Gosford requires to be improved by effective technicians for increasing traffic load.

9. References
Geissdoerfer, M., Vladimirova, D. and Evans, S., 2018. ‘Sustainable business model innovation: A review’, Journal of cleaner production, 198, pp. 401–416.

gosfordprivate.com.au, 2021.Our Hospital, Gosford Private Hospital. Available at: https://gosfordprivate.com.au/about-us/our-hospital (Accessed: 10 February 2021).

Higginson, S., Milovanovic, K., Gillespie, J., Matthews, A., Williams, C., Wall, L., Moy, N., Hinwood, M., Melia, A. and Paolucci, F., 2020. COVID-19: The need for an Australian economic pandemic response plan. Health policy and technology, 9(4), pp.488-502.

Jacqueline, L., 2021.4 Hospital Business Models for Consumer-Centric Healthcare, Xtelligent Healthcare Media, LLC. Available at: https://revcycleintelligence.com/news/4-hospital-business-models-for-consumer-centric-healthcare (Accessed: 10 February 2021).

Kash, B. and McKahan, M., 2017. ‘The evolution of measuring patient satisfaction’, of, 4, p. 2.

Naus, F. P. M., Faint, C.-A. and Dwyer, R. J., 2018. ‘Are Hospital Efficiency and Quality of Care Affordable Without External Revenue?’, International Journal of Applied Management and Technology, 16(1), p. 14.

Osborne, S. and Hammoud, M. S., 2017. ‘Effective employee engagement in the workplace’, International Journal of Applied Management and Technology, 16(1), p. 4. Padula, W. V and Delarmente, B. A., 2019. ‘The national cost of hospital?acquired pressure injuries in the United States’, International wound journal, 16(3), pp. 634–640.

Samiee, S. and Chirapanda, S., 2019. ‘International marketing strategy in emerging-market exporting firms’, Journal of International Marketing, 27(1), pp. 20–37.