Strategic planning is essential for successful health care organizations

Strategic planning is essential for successful health care organizations. Alignment between organizational strategic plans and human resource strategic plans is crucial to effectiveness. When developing organizational plans to address expansion or new services, for example, organizations must be sure to develop human resource plans that support the organizational strategy, as the key to changing organizational direction is through human resource planning. For this Discussion, you examine the following scenario and work with your team to address questions related to human resource strategic planning.

Scenario: The Memorial Hospital is a community-based hospital in an urban area plans to expand its patient care delivery model from focusing extensively on inpatient care to becoming a leader in ambulatory care. The mission of Memorial Healthcare is serving humanity by providing exceptional and cost-effective health care accessible to all. Furthermore, the vision is for Memorial Hospital to be a magnet-status health care provider, continually raising the standards of performance excellence and advancing the health status of the community. In doing so, Memorial Hospital acknowledges its values of compassionate service, ownership/pride, privacy, safety, accountability, teamwork, attitude, appearance, communication, and fun.

Current state:

• 300-bed hospital
• 1,000 employees
• Limited ambulatory focus, which is primarily supported by free-standing independent physician practices
• Declining revenues from inpatient admissions
• Considering closing as many as 100 beds, as it transitions from an inpatient focused organization to an outpatient

To prepare for this Discussion:

The Instructor assigned your team a question that relates to human resource strategic planning. Reflect on the scenario and assigned question, and as a team, begin discussing how you would respond to the question. Be sure to approach the question from the perspective of an administrator developing a human resource strategic plan for the hospital in the provided scenario.

By Day 4: Reach a consensus of what should be included in your response to the question assigned by the Instructor. As a team, draft content to post.

Post by Day 5: Select one team member to post the final content in the main area of the Discussion thread.

By Day 7: Individually respond to at least two other teams in one or more of the following ways:

• Provide recommendations for another team’s content.
• Offer insights on how your team’s content supports another team’s content.