Strategic Planning Assignment: Business Plan For Sonic Healthcare

Question

Task:
Strategic Planning Assignment Task: 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

Introduction
Sonic Healthcare, selected in this strategic planning assignment, is a worldwide counselling business providing lab medication or pathology, radiology or symptomatic imaging. Sonic is also a global pioneer in pharmacy activities in Australia and New Zealand with its headquarter in Sydney, Australia, and the rest of the world. Their continued operations and finance progress were driven by Sonic's unwavering dedication to a philosophy of medical leadership (Johnson, 2017). This hypothesis of the executives perceives the administration commitment of clinical, science, and designing experts and reflects the devotion to maintaining the connection among specialist and persistent, and urges Sonic to give the most extensive level of administration proficiency, respectability, and best-reasonable clinical treatment. For the financial year 2020, Sonic Healthcare generated A$528 million in net profits, with sales of A$6.8 billion.The board has been able to sustain shareholders with a small 1.2% rise in cumulative dividends per share to A$0.85 per year considering the effect of the pandemic on the financial performance for the year 2020 and aims to follow our advancement in dividends policies (Boddy et al., 2020). Our continued dedication to our people, the societies we represent, and cultures within the context of good corporate governance is embodied in the Sonic Healthcare Corporate Responsibility Report.

Strategic Planning for the period 2021-2026
Innovation in the supply chain
COVID-19 has a greater impact on the supply chain as due to mass spread of the virus has led to the lockdown of major factories and other industries which impacted the healthcare sector deeply as the supply of medicines and other emergency tools cannot be acquired on time and on-time medical services to patients have been hindered (Sternberg et al., 2020). So, it is important for Sonic Healthcare to improve its supply chain within the period 2021-2026 for better procurement of medical equipment and medicines on time such that on-time medical services can be provided to the patients.

Increasing Capacity
Since the impact of COVID is widespread which has led to the scarcity of beds to be provided to patients. Sonic Healthcare needs to consider increasing the capacity of the institution for admitting more patients in the upcoming years such that any kind of pandemic situation can be handled with proper care and efficiency.

Training workforce
Sonic Healthcare needs to focus on training the workforce in a much better way such that during any kind of pandemic situation the junior doctors and staff can be utilized to handle the situation and provide proper care to the patient.

Key issues or resistance in strategic changing
Due to COVID-19, the working procedures that used to be performed previously are being changed with is being highly resisted as the work patterns are being changed and it is not the same as before (Ehrlich et al., 2020). There are various factors that force resistance to change such as misunderstanding or lack of trust, self-interest, and a low tolerance for change.

Lack of trust
People oppose transition because the effect of the change is mistaken (Lee et al., 2020). This is inevitable because there is no trust in management and workers.

Self-interest
People are resisting reform because they believe they are losing worth individually. If this occurs, people may take a stronger interest in how the transition itself has an impact, not in how the change affects the organization's performance or otherwise (Korhonen & Granberg, 2020). Subtle workplace politics, where people tend to undermine change beneath the shallow surface of their comments in an effort to discourage change before it has started, also lead to opposition to change.

Low Tolerance
People resist improvement if they work effectively the same way for years. You worry you're going to change your way of functioning. You are scared that you cannot adapt or learn the modern way of functioning.

Kotter & Schlesinger strategies to overcome resistance
Kotter & Schlesinger has proposed six strategies in order to overcome the resistance to change which are as follows.

Education and communication
They should prepare the partners about the progress before it begins to diminish resistance to change. It would permit individuals from the group to value the requirement for development unbiasedly. Over-communications are safer than miscommunications (Rimmer et al., 2020). This will lead to a host of one-on-one discussions, Q&A workshops, city hall meetings, and seminars being considered.

Participation and involvement
In order to decrease resistance to change, colleagues ought to restrict change and participate in certain components of the change plan. By helping plan part of the transformation people become even more interested and it does not only meet its obligations.

Facilitation and support
Sonic healthcare should assist residents with the progress to moderate resistance to change. That could mean planning and tutoring or it could mean enthusiastic help for them. For stern, strong bosses and this can be a specific challenge.

Negotiation and agreement
A negotiated compromise with future resistors should be reached to alleviate the opposition to transition. For example, the individuals need to be motivated to change their methods of working might be given a monetary prize. Any course of action came to ought to be formal and composed so it very well may be returned later.

Manipulation
Manipulation requires selective utilization of information to initiate resistors to go about as they wish. It is significant for residents or associations to team up. It includes assuming a part in the Change Management Team for an individual. It implies that gatherings are allocated a work as a component of a change supervisory crew to a gathering chief or somebody the group trusts.

Explicit
They may use explicit or implicit coercion to limit resistance to change. They take steps to accept the move here by implication, or straightforwardly. This could bring about taking steps to leave their place of employment or taking steps to move them to another piece of the organization.

Wollondilly Health Alliance Model
Vision and Mission statement
The key vision of this model is to create a patient-centred medical home health system and to preserve and review the data gathered correctly for future growth (Simmons et al., 2018). In order to deliver improved preventive coverage and better medical resources, technologies and common patient data promote more comprehensive and consistent care and partnerships in the clinical system and a network of social support services (Godinho et al., 2020). Consumers are now interested in protecting and controlling their wellbeing and understand how to access services. Capacity to deliver content that is correct at the right time and place.Increased 24-hour access to care especially during the COVID-19 crisis, when patients require emergency care and appropriate services (Zarora et al., 2020). Adjust the standards of the patient or group as treatment is given properly.

Challenges and opportunities

Challenges
An aging population
The major concern during the COVID-19 situation is the aged person as the aged patients are mostly suffering chronic diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart disease, etc. So, it is a challenge for Sonic healthcare to develop strategic planning in order to handle aged patients during the period 2021-2026. As it is seen during the period 2020 that aged people are mostly affected by the COVID-19 virus and the death rate is also higher for aged patients as they are already suffering from various chronic diseases (Heath et al., 2020). And due to the corona situation, aged people suffered various situations where the patients did not receive proper treatment on time due to lock down to stop the outspread of the disease as a result proper treatment was very difficult to be provided to the aged patients.

Cybersecurity
While the pandemic 2020, Covid-19 showed how insecure sensitive patient information actually is even though malware, data leaks, and other cybersecurity problems are nothing new to the healthcare industry.

Invoicing and payment processing
Medical practices point to patient selection as their top-income period control war as a substantial part of their medical bill is taken up by patients (Pace et al., 2018). Providers have to stick to patient reimbursement preferences in order to enable customers to make payments in a timely fashion.

Price Transparency
In addition to the complexity of submitting purchases due to the shortage of alternatives, uncertainty due to lack of market certainty is another leading explanation why customers refuse to pay for financial accountability (Laurenza et al., 2018). As a result, hospital systems now opt for simplicity in their service rates. This eliminates patient frustration and billing disputes by surprise. The market transparency pandemic has become an important motto in the field of health care in 2020 and will most Australian healthcare systems potentially face a big challenge in the next year.

Opportunities
Covid-19 gave us a great chance to live a healthier life and rely more on sanitation and immunity. This virus has given us lessons in the future (Fausto et al., 2020). In the future, such information will form the basis for drafting recommendations that will allow the health system to become successful. Together, Australia is a significant contributor to the development of drugs, equipment, and working models to close bridges across the whole healthcare environment because of the share of labour, intelligence, and bandwidth involved in research and development.

Strategic Objectives based on the challenges and opportunities
The main objective of the strategic planning and business model in the healthcare industry and that is needed to be followed by Sonic Healthcare are as follows.

• The patients must be provided with proper treatment.
• Aged people must be provided with the proper diagnosis during pandemic period.
• Healthcare institution need to focus on maintaining transparency in billing.
• Doctors need to attain patient on demand.
• Proper technological tools must be used for proper diagnosis.

Conclusion
In Australia, the healthcare sector continues to face difficulties in view of the rapid advancement of medical technology. Stakeholders, including the Government, have made numerous efforts to develop the industry, but little has been done since that time. More needs to be done to solve the complex and ever-increasing issues that are fundamental to our health system. After COVID-19 fails to affect the nation and the world as a whole, the entire system of healthcare, prescription shortages, and pharmaceutical firms' restructuring will lead to higher costs for drugs after 2021.Hospital administrators need to demonstrate bargaining capacity to exploit their facilities for cheaper deals. Taking advantage of the scale and other incentives would be important to offset the rise in costs and increase decreases.

References
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Johnson, C. (2017). Sonic does the right thing by patients in pulling out of pharmacy pathology. Australian Medicine, 29(13), 11.

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Pace, P., Aloi, G., Gravina, R., Caliciuri, G., Fortino, G., & Liotta, A. (2018). An edge-based architecture to support efficient applications for healthcare industry 4.0. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 15(1), 481-489.

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