Overview Analysis
According to the information from Baptist Health South Florida Hospital (2021), the facility is visited by approximately 1.5 million patients per annum. Most of the reviews of the hospital come from the people who visited the Baptist Health South Florida Hospital (BHSFH) and remained contented with the level of care quality established by the administration. It was also noted that some of the families travel to Miami from other states or even countries in order to gain access to the famous medical expertise possessed by the resident medics.
In line with the evidence from the hospital’s website, there are almost 25,000 employees and at least 5,000 physicians of a huge variety of specialties (Baptist Health South Florida Hospital, 2021). Despite being a world-class organization, the BHSFH could benefit from certain improvements linked to the organizational culture and learning, which are going to be discussed in this particular paper.
Organizational Recommendations
In order to align the given leadership philosophy against the organizational design, the management would have to pay more attention to the notion of accountability and ensure that every employee recognizes its value. The culmination of the given initiatives would be the implementation of initiatives that would also attest to employee performance excellence and give rise to a unique leadership system (Rider et al., 2018).
Alternatively, the team would also ensure that the concept of patient safety is carefully nurtured and promoted among all possible stakeholders. To move in the direction of a stronger organizational philosophy, the BHSFH would also have to invest in leadership culture and ensure that the reliability of its approaches withstands the test of time and patient issues.
Another crucial set of organizational recommendations would have to be linked to the process of enhancing the organization’s shared values and creating more inspiring vision statements and more effective mission statements. This particular mission could be accomplished with the help of focusing on patient outcomes and creating a caring environment where every staff member recognizes their strengths and weaknesses while performing at the highest level possible (Azzolini et al., 2018).
The hospital’s management could also capitalize on larger collaborations and invest in feasible innovations to create an even bigger name for the BHSFH. Under the condition that mutual benefits are in place, other healthcare organizations would become more interested in partnering with one of Florida’s most prominent care facilities. The ultimate scalability of such solutions is going to become the calling card of the hospital in a case where it succeeds.
Improving organizational structure and systems in a way that increases the potential for innovation also seems to be a rational step for the BHSFH because employee values are not being adequately protected and supported at the moment. The current problem relates to the fact that most healthcare employees are currently at the frontline of protecting patients from the adverse outcomes of the pandemic, which ultimately makes them sensibly more prone to work-balance problems and their derivatives (Rider et al., 2021).
With the help of evidence from relevant literature, it was also established that the high levels of psychological distress experienced by medical workers at the BHSFH might become rather costly for the management on a long-term scale. Therefore, the organizational structure could be carefully reviewed by the hospital’s administration to ensure constantly positive returns on investment and stronger mental health for all employees.
The ultimate organizational recommendation that could improve the state of affairs at the BHSFH is to pay more attention to the notion of work-life balance. The intensity of occupational stress continues to grow, causing more healthcare workers to experience professional burnout, and the BHSFH staff is not an exception. In the words of Sawan et al. (2018), the best way to predict a direct work-life imbalance and affect it in a proactive manner would be to utilize stress screening methods more often and align the organizational culture against the core values of management representatives, care team members, and even patients.
Without a proper work-life balance, employees would be facing more stress from interactions with patients and the inability to cope with the pressure created by the pandemic. A supportive workplace is required to improve the well-being of most BHSFH employees and invest in positive patient outcomes.
Organizational Learning Assessment
Organizational learning across BHSFH is established with the help of formal leaders and senior management representatives such as chiefs of staff and chief executive officers (Baptist Health South Florida Hospital, 2021). One possible way of improving the strength of management initiatives proposed by the team mentioned above would be the strengthening of the middle management team with the help of unit leaders.
The latter would conduct practical experiments and encourage employees to build engagement. Given the workplace conditions that are majorly affected by the pandemic, it should also be noted that organizational learning should be implemented in ways promoting psychological safety and remediate personal issues.
In order to capture the learning process, the management of BHSFH resorts to the all-around assistance of informal network leaders who instantly become responsible for building interpersonal relationships within the team or even outside the organization. In accordance with the evidence presented by Lee and Doran (2017), this approach could be an essential way to improve the learning process due to the lack of limiting authority that would drive the team away from achieving their personal objectives and seeing them as inferior to the organizational vision.
Employees at BHSFH tend to demonstrate a high level of commitment since their actions stem from individual convictions and not forcefully imposed values. The learning process is mostly focused on ways of improving patient safety and outcomes, and it often incorporates the patients’ feedback to help the workforce gain a better insight into the external expectations that have to be met.
The process of learning transfer across BHSFH is set up in a way that allows the organization to sustain and promote the value of organizational learning while focusing on the evaluation of organizational learning success across different organizational groups. The informal local leadership significantly improves the process of knowledge transmission by monitoring the hospital’s ability to adhere to the high standards of education and training instilled by the organization.
The concept of conveying information is recurrently discussed in the literature on the subject of organizational education as one of the fundamental practices that precede the management in attaining organizational objectives and enhancing the quality of care (Rider et al., 2021). Therefore, BHSFH employs an adequate strategy for learning transfer, as it maintains high-quality care and monitors positive patient outcomes through the interface of transferring all the required information to team members.
In order to evaluate the process of learning across the organization, the management of BHSFH employs a dynamic approach that allows the team to accommodate all possible changes that could affect the organization in the future. In other words, hospital management causes the team to review service delivery models both individually and in groups within pre-established time frames.
This approach allows the team to evaluate the learning process from a number of different standpoints, from globalization and socio-cultural variables to migration trends and the level of urbanization (Reimers-Hild, 2018). When necessary, the team could also disseminate all the required information in multiple languages to convey the nuances of care and organizational improvements. At BHSFH, the learning process can be perceived as a lifelong initiative because staff members are recurrently making sure they have access to the most up-to-date information.
Organizational Learning Recommendations
If the management of BHSFH is looking forward to generating more knowledge and better learning across the organization, the team should review the approach to positive change and ensure that patient feedback is included in the new agenda. This is a relevant idea because most organizations do not cultivate collective knowledge and cognition.
Therefore, there is an opportunity for one of Florida’s best hospitals to introduce actions aimed at helping employees achieve desired outcomes while paying enough attention to organizational learning. In the literature, this process is described as a valuable strategy that could develop a stronger bond between the management and employees as well (Rider et al., 2018). The concept of organizational learning should not be limited by BHSFH in any way, especially if individual employees are striving to lead the organization and share experiences with other stakeholders.
In order to inspire people to share their ideas and learn, BHSFH could benefit from showcasing the potential outcomes of gaining additional knowledge to team members. They would see the core weaknesses and strengths of the organization more clearly, developing a potential improvement strategy for their respective units. All-inclusive training sessions would significantly motivate care providers to come up with innovative research questions and hypotheses (Lee & Doran, 2017).
Therefore, there is going to be an empirical upside to the connection between the management and employees, where both are going to pick only appropriate variables and instruments for their research. Some staff members could also be asked to gather into groups to complete a variety of research projects aimed at enhancing patient outcomes and improving the work-life balance.
The process of capturing ideas and learning while turning them into organizational knowledge should be mediated by nurse leaders and nurse managers across BHSFH. All the potential learning experiences have to be turned into practical knowledge with the help of continuous training sessions and leadership guidance (De Brún et al., 2019).
Even though patient care stands at the forefront of the list of hospital-bound activities, the key source of power possessed by BHSFH staff lies in the additional experiences they could face when interacting with each other and exploring professional literature on the subject. Employee ideas could also be captured and turned into knowledge with the help of consultations with care experts from other facilities and computerized analysis of patient care patterns that have been previously ignored by the team.
To make sure learning is ongoing, BHSFH would have to cultivate an environment where lifelong learning is synonymous with a sense of purpose and represents an essential organizational value. In the process of achieving this, the team would have to establish an environment where psychological safety would be in place, and no resources would be too scarce (Azzolini et al., 2018).
Organizational learning has to be fostered to have employees reflect on each other’s successes and challenges and reach relevant verdicts related to how adverse events should be reported, what could be done to respond to them, and why the team would be interested in preventing similar events in the future. None of the above is going to become a reality without regular training meetings, guidance, strong leadership, and timely coaching, as all of them represent the notion of ongoing learning.
References
Azzolini, E., Ricciardi, W., & Gray, M. (2018). Healthcare organizational performance: Why changing the culture really matters. Annali dell’Istituto Superiore di Sanita, 54(1), 6-8.
Baptist Health South Florida Hospital. (2021). About Baptist Health. Baptisthealth. Web.
De Brún, A., O’Donovan, R., & McAuliffe, E. (2019). Interventions to develop collectivistic leadership in healthcare settings: A systematic review. BMC Health Services Research, 19(1), 1-22.
Lee, C. T. S., & Doran, D. M. (2017). The role of interpersonal relations in healthcare team communication and patient safety: A proposed model of the interpersonal process in teamwork. Canadian Journal of Nursing Research, 49(2), 75-93.
Reimers-Hild, C. (2018). Strategic foresight, leadership, and the future of rural healthcare staffing in the United States. Jaapa, 31(5), 44-49.
Rider, E. A., Frost, J. S., & Longmaid III, H. E. (2021). Embedding shared interprofessional values in healthcare organizational culture: The National Academies of Practice experience. Journal of Interprofessional Education & Practice, 23, 100348.
Rider, E. A., Gilligan, M. C., Osterberg, L. G., Litzelman, D. K., Plews-Ogan, M., Weil, A. B.,… & Branch, W. T. (2018). Healthcare at the crossroads: The need to shape an organizational culture of humanistic teaching and practice. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 33(7), 1092-1099.
Sawan, M., Jeon, Y. H., & Chen, T. F. (2018). Relationship between organizational culture and the use of psychotropic medicines in nursing homes: A systematic integrative review. Drugs & Aging, 35(3), 189-211.