Gaps and/or Opportunities
Come up with a statement describing at least one gap and/or opportunity for enhanced services or approaches within your healthcare organization. For each gap or opportunity, identify one possible solution, applying systems thinking to your approach. Be sure to address the financial (including budgetary) impacts of your solutions, consulting as needed with your finance counselor.
Solution
Healthcare facilities face varying degrees of challenges and new opportunities that need to be identified and responded to appropriately. In the healthcare facility where I currently work, one gap one can identify is the shortage of nurses within the hospital. The hospital has 24 nurses and a capacity of about 500 patients. That puts it roughly at a nurse-patient ratio of 1:20. This ratio is way above what is recommended in the US, which varies between 1:2 and 1:5 (Sharma & Rani, 2020). To address this, the hospital needs to employ more nurses and work to retain the existing ones. It can Convert Current Nurses into Recruiters and Compensate for Referrals to access and attract more nurses. It can also implement an Onboarding Program to make the new nurse feel welcomed, maybe by not assigning them to problematic patients right away.
Opportunities are equally presented in the current healthcare. For instance, the hospital is currently facing a dire need to make the provision of e-health services better and more convenient. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic saw many patients and care providers holding back on providing and receiving healthcare services physically, but preferring virtual ones. This has become a trend, with the hospital continuously seeing it unnecessary to provide every service physically. However, the existing e-health program is not well-developed to accommodate a large number of patients. The hospital needs more funding sources to enhance the development of the e-health infrastructure. More computers and laptops are required. The personnel needs to be further trained on e-health programs. Additionally, cybersecurity risks, including hacking and unauthorized access to patient information need to be adequately addressed.
References
Sharma, S. K., & Rani, R. (2020). Nurse-to-patient ratio and nurse staffing norms for hospitals in India: a critical analysis of national benchmarks. Journal of family medicine and primary care, 9(6), 2631. https://10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_248_20