Public Health Administration
Project Management?
When it comes to healthcare, project management plays a very crucial role. This is because the stakes are much higher. Additionally, hospital institutions that practice operational project management are at a tremendous advantage because they will benefit from lower costs as well as improved outcomes. Since the well-being of the patients matters a lot to hospital institutions, project management in healthcare becomes more complex, which consequently makes it even more critical. It is, therefore, worth the investment and effort to ensure that things are done right because the beneficiaries are the hospital and the patients. This kind of outcome is desirable since it is a win-win on both ends. I know of very few people with a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. This is because the steps taken towards certification are complicated, and most people are either afraid to take on the task or may give up halfway. Research shows that it is challenging to engage project managers who show little to no interest in certification (Farashah, Thomas, & Blomquist, 2019).
There are four types of project managers. These include gambler, prophet, executor, and expert. The executor is the project manager we are most interested in here. The executor is always active in his pursuit of business opportunities that are found within the existing strategic boundaries. He or she is not stopped by any risk, uncertainty, or challenge, but is instead focused on the need for execution. Executors regularly depend on organizational members to trail behind their analyses, which is considered as the surest path to success (Pedersen & Ritter, 2017).
Project Management
Communication and having relationships are among the most valuable features of project managers in the process of project management. An important point to note, however, is that communication skills are rated higher than the building of relationships. This is due to various reasons. A journal article by Muszynska (2016) claimed that the skill of communication possessed by the project managers influenced the fundamental areas in project management. This skill is required to constructively convey the critical areas of quality, cost, and even time. This being the case, the expertise of communication incorporates the key features mentioned above (cost, scope, and time) to bring about quality services in healthcare. This, therefore, means that communication is the “lifeblood” of any project management process and thus to realize the goals and objectives that are set by public health projects, the project manager should be able to communicate clearly and fluently to ensure collaboration and integration of information in public health administration (Muszyńska, 2016)
Project managers in healthcare should be certified instead of merely considering the fact that they are familiar with the operations of the projects area. As mentioned earlier, very few individuals have the Project Management Professional certification, due to difficulty in the certification process. This being the case, many of the individuals tend to quit midway through the process. Putting this into context, project managers with certifications all undergone a vigorous process to achieve this and can, therefore, tackle anything that is brought to them in the process of project management. An important fact is also that it is strenuous to engage project managers with no certifications (Farashah et al., 2019).
Ready? Set? Oh!
According to reports from the New York Times, New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center in the year 2006 was hit by Hurricane Katrina. The floodwaters then marooned the hospital putting out power while at the same time, temperatures rose to over 100 degrees Celsius. When investigators came to the hospital a little while later, they were shocked since there were a lot of bodies that were situated in the morgue, a total of 45 corpses. It was then discovered that a doctor (Anna Pou) and two other nurses were responsible for quickening the deaths of some of the victims through lethal injections. Later on, in July of the year 2006, the doctor was arrested together with the nurses, but she defended herself in court, saying she was only easing the pain of the victims instead of the prolonged suffering. (NYTimes, 2009).
Following reports from CBS News, Manhattan’s NYU Langone Medical Center during Superstorm Sandy in the year 2012 was forced to evacuate as a result of the storm. The hospital began its evacuation process through shifting three hundred patients by the early evening hours of Monday, and by the following day in the morning, everybody had been evacuated successfully (CBS News, 2012).
Memorial Hospital in New Orleans experienced the vulnerabilities during the calamity of Hurricane Katrina, which included supply shortages, power losses, sheer exhaustion, malfunction of communications both inside and outside the hospital and finally, they did not have definite plans of evacuation (Hayes & Lee Daugherty Biddison, 2015). In contrast, NYU Langone Medical Center during the Superstorm Sandy experienced the vulnerabilities of inexperience in responding to disasters as they lacked the training necessary to do so quickly and efficiently (VanDevanter et al., 2017). In the matter of responses, Memorial hospital was slow to evacuate its patients. Due to minimal resources, they were forced to evacuate the patients on a specific order according to the level of illness, while other patients were reported to have died as a result of euthanasia issued by the doctors and nurses. NYU Langone Medical Center, on the other hand, was quite useful in the evacuation process. Although the nurses lacked experience, they were able to draw their resourcefulness and, through effective leadership and support, evacuated all the patients overnight. The lesson offered in this case is the preparedness that individuals and the hospitals must-have if something occurs as this could prove useful in saving lives.
Be prepared
To protect the lives of patients, staff, and health facilities. Health facilities need to be ready during times of disaster, either human-made or natural. The CMS has conditions and standards to determine the level of preparedness in the health care facility. CMS developed the following guidelines to establish a consistent emergency preparedness. They include proper planning, organization, excellent communication, training, equipping personnel, and excising on how to tackle emergencies. When a plan is generated, constant re-evaluation is required, which is done through simulations, successful actions, strategies, and drills. These standards apply to the following; Hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, psychiatric treatment facilities, elderly care centers, organ transplant facilities, religious non-medical facilities, individual and intellectual disability care institutions, outpatient rehabilitation centers, public health agencies, community health facilities clinics, organ procurement facilities, and terminal renal disease facilities. (Dash et al., 2019)
With periodic maintenance of the emergency plans, comes an effective and efficient response to disasters. Challenges in emergency preparedness may arise from poor leadership, inadequate funding, lack of action plans and commitments, and poor communication. The management of the health institutions is therefore required by law to follow all guidelines put in place to increase their level of preparedness in emergencies. CMS aims to safeguard the available physical resources, availability of human resources, and ensuring that all business operations run smoothly as possible. The health facilities with these standards are regarded as emergency preparedness to disasters (Drummond & O’Rourke, 2019)
Insight hiding in plain sight
With enormous data flowing into the health sector systems with the objective of improving health care in the country, advanced analytics is needed in dealing with the large and readily available data in the health industry as a whole. Data generated from hospital records, patient’s health records, reports from medical examinations, the response from implanted health devices, intelligence from health research, and necessary information from the internet is managed and analyzed by technology and used in providing health care to the public. Advanced analytics helps in providing accurate and quick responses to problems in the health sector and even providing updates on the patient’s well-being wherever they are located. It is an excellent tool in providing assisting health professionals in tackling the most troubling infections and problems (Durovich, 2018).
The medical data requires management and proper analysis to obtain useful information, and this is done by using high tech computing to provide relevant solutions needed by health professionals, thus improving the community health care. The progressive analysis is revolutionizing the capability of the provision of health care to all those who need it in the community by providing better services and proper financial management. Other sources of health information include parental consultation, sociology, and even an individual’s behavior. The role of population health is to imitate an individuals’ infection state, health aspects, risk factors to describe and outline health outcomes, such as life expectancy, quality of the individual living life, disease occurrences, and health costs. This provides a broad prospect on how to treat patients and how to make sure the treatment responds accordingly. (Kindig, 2020)
References
CBS News (2012) NYC hospitals evacuated for superstorm. Cbsnews.com. Retrieved 21 July 2020, from https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/nyc-hospitals-evacuated-for-superstorm/.
Dash, S., Shakyawar, S., Sharma, M., & Kaushik, S. (2019). Big data in healthcare: management, analysis and future prospects. Journal of Big Data, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-019-0217-0
Drummond, S., & O’Rourke, M. (2019). Emergency Preparedness in Ambulatory Surgery Centers and Office-Based Anesthesia Practices. Manual of Practice Management for Ambulatory Surgery Centers, 283-293. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19171-9_19
Durovich, C. (2018). Designing a Community-Based Population Health Model | Population Health Management. Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. Retrieved 21 July 2020, from http://doi.org/10.1089/pop.2017.0015.
Farashah, A. D., Thomas, J., & Blomquist, T. (2019). Exploring the value of project management certification in selection and recruiting. International Journal of Project Management, 37(1), 14–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2018.09.005
Farashah, A., Thomas, J., & Blomquist, T. (2019). Exploring the value of project management certification in selection and recruiting. International Journal of Project Management, 37(1), 14-26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2018.09.005
Gordon, A., & Pollack, J. (2018). Managing Healthcare Integration. Project Management Journal, 49(5), 5-21. https://doi.org/10.1177/8756972818785321
Hayes, M., & Lee Daugherty Biddison, E. (2015). Five Days at Memorial. A Review. Annals of The American Thoracic Society, 11(6), 1000-1001. https://doi.org/10.1513/annalsats.201405-194ot
Kindig, D. (2020). Google.com. Retrieved 21 July 2020, from https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiS84W3mt_qAhULKBoKHTKmDNkQFjAKegQIARAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fajph.aphapublications.org%2Fdoi%2Fpdfplus%2F10.2105%2FAJPH.93.3.380&usg=AOvVaw18n_CcIRn-RxRBsfqEfnTS.
Muszyńska, K. (2016). Project Communication Management Patterns. Proceedings of the 2016 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems. https://doi.org/10.15439/2016f235
NYTimes (2009) The Deadly Choices at Memorial. Nytimes.com. Retrieved 21 July 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30doctors.html.
Pedersen, C. L., & Ritter, T. (2017, July 27). The 4 Types of Project Manager. Retrieved July 21, 2020, from Harvard Business Review website: https://hbr.org/2017/07/the-4-types-of-project-manager
VanDevanter, N., Raveis, V., Kovner, C., McCollum, M., & Keller, R. (2017). Challenges and Resources for Nurses Participating in a Hurricane Sandy Hospital Evacuation. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 49(6), 635-643. https://doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12329