Free Management Dissertations - General Manager Of A Nhs Hospital This Analysis Of The Case Study Identified
General Manager of a NHS Hospital
This analysis of the case study identified in the ACAD Human Relations project, addresses the issue of concern from the Hospital General Manager’s perspective.
The Hospital General Manager is responsible for explaining the opinions delivered from the management level while assisting the Chief Executive in persuading the members of staff to support the new facility. Resistance from other members of staff would delay the progress of the project.
Organisational change processes are influenced by the institutionalisation of power and the behaviour of interest groups in and around organisations (Pettigrew, 1973; Pfeffer, 1992). The institutional and political systems play an important role in organisational change. When organisations are changed fundamentally, the existing balance of power changes as well (Pfeffer, 1992). Forces in and around the organisation trying to maintain this balance can hinder such changes. These subtle political power plays will be an important consideration for the Hospital General Manager. The existing balance of power has changed, in accordance with Pfeffer’s description above, from the consultants and senior medical practitioners, to managers whose emphasis is efficiency. This is a large cultural change, as well as structural change for the organisation.
The Chief Executive is motivated ‘by a powerful ambition to improve patients’ lives’, and the General Manager would need to match this ambition to the concerns of those affected by the changes. In many respects the Prime Minister’s speech has further damaged relations between medical professions and the management team, by stating that ‘this project has put patients not the professionals at the very top of the agenda’.
The General Manager’s primary concern should be assisting the senior managers and hospital consultants in rectifying their differences. The hospital consultant’s have resisted to the implementation of the new plans because it requires that they have to ‘be available at unpredictable times for the three and a half hour operating sessions allocated within their fractional contracts.’ This situation has made it ‘difficult to manage their private work as flexibly, conveniently, and profitably as they wished.’
The General Manager’s position should therefore be to convince the consultants that these changes are necessary on a cost basis, and as essential for the efficiency of the overall unit. As the case states, ‘it is potentially much more efficient than traditional hospitals, and so justifications of efficiency are paramount in attacking the status quo in which specialities had their own schedulers, enabling consultants to determine their own, often private work/focused timetables’. It must be the General Manager’s prerogative to transfer the Chief Executive’s wish for greater efficiency to the consultant’s work practices.
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