Signature: Plan on Performance Management System

Signature: Performance Management
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Signature: Performance Management
Performance management in healthcare organizations is instrumental in ensuring the consistent achievement of goals in an efficient and effective manner. It primarily helps them to achieve wellness goals through accountability, patient-centered care services, quality, as well as cost and data management. The department of health and human services in the United States specifies the circumstances under which a clinical facility may choose to measure its operations, and they are incorporated in the preparation of this assignment (Bernal-Delgado et al., 2018; Rowland, 2017). These factors include baseline creation, distinguishing actual and projected activities, decision-making based on concrete evidence, conducting performance comparisons across sites or hospitals, recognizing improved performance, as well as tracking each change to ensure long-term sustainability. This project describes a performance management system for a virtual hospital named Lifecare. It details the organization’s life safety plan, performance improvement processes, process improvement strategy, as well as ethical issues resolution, and communication strategies. The project presents Lifecare’s risk management assessment and issue resolution plan, as well as the specific management framework and how results are communicated.
Organization’s Life Safety Plan
Lifecare’s safety plan will involve the ‘defense-in-place’ strategy, which is helpful in ensuring hospital safety. It includes the facility’s entire operating systems, and it will be affected through the ‘total concept’ approach. With this approach, the facility will have an assortment of features that reduce or eliminate unnecessary patient movements outside in case of fire (Saleh, 2017). Lifecare will provide different protection gears and move patients to adjacent safety areas within the same floor. Furthermore, the hospital will include allowable building alarms, sprinklers, and detection gadgets, apart from training the workforce on safe and adequate patient protection. Staff response will be integral in saving lives, and they will act through availability, hands-on service, and fire management. Regarding fire alarms, the safety department will install alarms in each building and place flashlights in intensive care units and surgical rooms, as well as areas that have high levels of noise. Additionally, voice evacuation systems will be installed in patient rooms and public areas in the facility. Fire extinguishers will be installed throughout the facility’s buildings and the hazardous areas, especially the rooms without sprinkles (Saleh, 2017). Lifecare requires standpipes and horse reels throughout the hospital. Moreover, the facility requires automatic suppression systems. These systems will be vital in the kitchen to safeguard hazardous cooking equipment, such as fat fryers when they are used in an open kitchen. Lifecare will have a kitchen system outside its restaurant and gas extinguishers in every room where a fire outbreak can largely interrupt operations (Saleh, 2017). Regarding smoke control, Lifecare will be equipped with a stairwell pressurization system. Each guest room corridor will have a smoke evacuation.
Overall, patients are at heightened risk of harm due to fire outbreaks. Thus, healthcare staff is tasked with ensuring safety by informing patients who are unconscious about the incident and those that are in jeopardy of the calamity. The aforementioned built-in systems will be incorporated with staff training on fire safety to optimize security for the most vulnerable population.
Performance Improvement Processes
In this section, Lifecare will involve stakeholders and seek their opinions to gain efficiency and reduce adverse events. Essentially, hospital staff will be consulted to develop a consensus process amongst themselves and identify the practices that are safe to target. For example, they will provide an overview of the hazards they experience every day in their practice, and they can have significant impacts on patient safety. Furthermore, they will provide solutions to the challenges that require interventions concerning interdisciplinary communication and teamwork. This step focuses on the issues that were recognized as fundamental aspects of developing a culture of safety. Lifecare shall benchmark other hospitals and build upon their success (Klazinga, 2018). Furthermore, involving stakeholders to determine subject choices and define roles, objectives, and health care expectations, apart from motivating teams and using results from data analyses to make decisions, will lead to the hospital’s better performance. It is also crucial to consider the perspectives of all staff, whether they are contractual or not, as a strategy for ensuring diversity and inclusion in decision-making.
Process Improvement Strategy
Lifecare will utilize the Lean Six Sigma strategy in process improvement to eliminate waste and minimize flaws in care delivery. When applied correctly, the framework can increase patient satisfaction and return on investment. Deshmukh et al. (2019) and Haque et al. (2020) note that hospitals experience defects affecting customer satisfaction and revenue, which determine the facility’s sustainability. The Six Sigma strategy contains six parameters, namely define, measure, analyze, improve, control, and streamline (Deshmukh et al., 2019). Because Lifecare is expanding, defining the problems encountered in care delivery will be crucial to set achievable goals. For example, it has faced challenges with longer wait times, and therefore, stakeholders will define and set goals that will help to achieve shorter wait times (Elkomy & Cookson, 2020). Additionally, the financial management department will create a process map that elaborates on details such as records updates, review of insurance information, and gathering co-pays. Regarding measurement, the hospital will assess the performance of the current check-in process. It will primarily identify the processes that are slowing down in the facility and make adjustments. The analysis will involve the assessment of information gathered at each and determine the root cause of each problem. Furthermore, improvement will require the hospital to develop and test solutions to bottlenecks for better check-ns. Lifecare has not been acquiring insurance information before the patient arrives, but this performance management system will ensure it is available beforehand. It will also improve coordination between patients and nurses through its tracer methodology. The facility will control the process by ensuring that new check-ins are frequently monitored and updated. It will, for the first time, create a control chart to assess the effectiveness of new processes. The hospital will ensure that its recruitment department emphasizes certification in Lean Six Sigma for candidates employed for consultation, quality management, performance improvement, as well as monitoring and evaluation. With this strategy, Lifecare will reduce wait times in its private practices and hospitals, prevent injuries and falls, reduce medication errors, and maximize turnaround time in the lab.
Ethical issues resolution and communication strategies
Nurses and other healthcare workers face tremendous ethical situations in their day-to-day practice. For example, they are often in a dilemma regarding honesty and withholding information (Pozgar, 2019). Patient family members may need to protect their emotions by concealing wellness information, while patients are entitled to know their medical conditions. This situation poses ethical challenges to nurses in how to share such data and, at the same time, comply with the family’s beliefs. Lifecare will emphasize open communications between clients and caregivers and empower the latter to uphold truth-telling to win patient trust.
Furthermore, the healthcare workforce is faced with the contradiction between science and spirituality. The evidence-based views of healthcare can jeopardize personal and spiritual perceptions (Poz...