This balanced scorecard is intended to assist Care Town Health Center departmental managers in improving organizational performance and hence improving service delivery to its clients. The health center's objective is ""to be the society's top health service provider," while the mission statement ""is committed to providing high-quality healthcare services through compassionate care and service excellence." "Caretown Hospital's vision statement is to be the best health care provider in the community. Care Town Hospital is to be committed in the provision if high-quality healthcare services through compassionate care and service excellence
I came with this balanced scorecard and identified the following objectives that have to be achieved in the upcoming days. Currently, Care Town Hospital is the only health facility in our region and therefore serves an average of 100 outgoing patients on a daily basis. This balanced scorecard is aimed at streamlining the general healthcare's operations which will also improve the quality of services that customers are offered. The following strategies were identified and could be pursued.
Increase utilization of services
Provide high-quality services
Retrain, recognize and motivate staff
Ensure patients' safety when being served at the health facility
So as to improve the performance in the health facility, the above strategies were placed into various perspectives as follows.
Learning and Growth
Perspective (Clinicians & Staff)
Retrain, recognize and motivate staff
Internal Process Perspective
(Safety & Quality)
• Provide high-quality services
Customer Perspective (Community & Patients)
• Increase utilization of services Financial Perspectives (Development and Business)
• operate in an environment where we minimize costs and but also increase the quality of services that are offered
Casual linkages of performance and service delivery were determined by the strategies mentioned above. A strategy map was developed to demonstrate how the strategies above could be used to support the vision and mission. The major main reason for the development of this strategic map was to clearly communicate the connection between the company's mission statement and the strategies that were adopted. This could serve as the most efficient tool of communication. The following is Care Town Hospital strategy map (Varia, 2005).
Balanced Scorecard
MISSION: Care Town Health Center is committed to the provision if high-quality healthcare services through compassionate care and service excellence
Clients Viewpoint (Community & Patients)
Increased use of services
Financial Perspectives (Development and Business)
Operate in an environment where we maximize costs and but also increase the quality of services that are offered
Internal Process Perspective (Safety & Quality)
Offer first-class services
Gaining More Knowledge So As To Grow And Learn (Clinicians & Staff)
Retrain, recognize and motivate staff
RESULTS IN
RESULTS IN
The following action plans were identified to help track the accomplishment of each strategy. Both the lead (a predictor of future performance) and lag (historical performance) were used (Varia, 2005).
Learning and Growth Perspective (Clinicians & Staff)
Retrain, recognize and motivate staff
ACTIONS:
Update/Review benefits/salaries to ensure competitiveness
Come up with a performance based compensation
Develop peer recognition program
MEASURES:
Lag indicator (satisfaction of employees)
lead indicator (Turnover rate)
Internal Process Perspective (Safety & Quality)
Offer first-class services
ACTIONS:
Come up with an automated Pharmaceutical dispensing
Review Room staffing patient flow streamline and process
Review Emergency Room staffing to ensure adequacy
MEASURES:
Lead indicator % Room staffing patient attended to fifteen minutes of arrival lag indicator-Any form of treatment faults per dose
Clients Viewpoint (Community & Patients)
Increased use of services
ACTIONS:
Implement marketing plan
Implement customer service
MEASURES:
Lag indicator clients satisfactory in 90% tile lead measure regular daily senses
Financial Perspectives (Development and Business)
Operate in an environment where we maximize costs and but also increase the quality of services that are offered
ACTIONS:
The collection and billing process for timeliness and accuracy
MEASURES
The total revenue would increase before the year
Advantages of the Performance Data Scorecard
A balanced scorecard helps in integrating various organization programs such as customer services and even quality. When health care professionals are allowed to provide health care in collaboration, the can achieve the best quality service for patients as required. If the results from the performance scorecard indicate that service to the customer is weak, focusing all the employees on customer service performance can ultimately lead to an improved performance in each unit or even department. The general impact will be enhanced organizational services to the customers across the board ("Health Care Financial Management for Nurse Managers: Merging the Heart with the Dollar," 2017).
A balanced score card is also useful as a means of breaking down strategic measures to assist the lower levels of management in understanding their responsibilities. A balanced scorecard makes sure that each member of the organization has clear targets that are essential in supporting the overall goal.
This balanced scorecard will also help in identifying various aspects in the organization needed to improve performance. Focusing on areas of weakness can help improve the organization's overall performance. This can indeed improve efficiency and also streamline the internal processes so that in the long run, the hospital can operate at the lowest costs possible.
Current Trends in Healthcare
Today, the pattern of employee engagement in the hospital follows the increasing levels since the year 2007. Employees in the organization are currently embracing the changing elements to employee engagement that include the increased interests in staying with the employer. The staffs have a motivation for providing more effort and love their present place of work. Moreover, employees in the organization are recommending other people to their current workplace. Basing on this hospital, it is clear that staff engagement today is following the trend of employee engagement in the healthcare sector. Therefore, two of the current trends in health care that relate to employee engagement are the management of the millennial generation when compared with the previous generation and upholding the functional and emotional drivers of employee engagement.
Efficient Management of the Millennial Generation
The millennials have a common feature whereby they all strive harder to keep their employment status than the other previous generations. These individuals have interests in all industries including healthcare (White 1). There has been an upward trend in the efficient management of employees who are millennials since the year 2011 and little or no shift in employee engagement for the past few years (People Metrics 5). The contemporary workplace in healthcare is transforming, and every staff is working to achieve personal accountability. The step towards taking personal responsibility to one's duties in the place of work demonstrates that current employees are engaging through the advancement of the career. This form of engagement means that the quality of healthcare is improving whereby workers are taking an active part in the care delivery process when compared to previous years.
Employees today have been able to plan, lead, train, continue with education and take more responsibility in health care workplace than before through engagement. Healthcare systems have also expanded their structures and functionalities to accommodate the growing number of healthcare professionals. Within the next decade, it is evident that health care systems will accommodate more healthcare staffs as they would have grown in size. The quality and efficiency of health services provided by the employees to patients would also improve. Such consolidations would be as a result of the excellent services offered by the healthcare staffs who manage the day-to-day operations within the institutions. More professionals have embraced the rural areas and are currently administering health services in these regions.
Functional and emotional motivators to employee engagement
The second trend that currently prevails in healthcare and that relates to employee engagement is fully upholding the practical and emotional motivators to engagement. Employees in the 21st-century value the fulfillment of internal factors than the external influences. Internal factors that are crucial to employees' satisfaction in an organization are mastery, purpose, and autonomy while the external factors of rewards and bonuses. Therefore, when employees recognize that they have a purpose in the organization and that their autonomy is respected, they engage more in achieving better outcomes. Staffs are now more focused on fulfilling their emotional drivers with the aim of achieving job satisfaction. The focus on fulfilling intrinsic factors has a greater impact on driving engagement when compared to extrinsic factors. Also, employees are valuing their social norms in the workplace to ensure appropriate behaviors that reinforce their quality of service to patients are achieved (People Metrics 6).
Theories Explaining the Current Trends as they Relate to Employee Engagement and Quality
Three approaches relating to the current trends in healthcare and the influence on employee engagement include the theory of relativity, employees' coping mechanism and real improvement in organization performance (People Metrics 9). The relativity theory states that people in the workplace will always look for things that relate to others and make their judgment based on comparisons that are relative. The theory explains the reasons that humans to focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another. The modern-day employees value what they have and work hard to ensure their intellectual and material possessions are maintained. Therefore, employees' engagement is improved when their internal drivers are fulfilled, and their performance is an indication of the quality of service.
The employees' coping mechanism theory states that the positive shifts in the workplace reinforce the adaptive and survival strategies of employees. The ability of employees to find their emotional factors that are good is a plan that helps them remain engaged even if the functional factors have decreased. The theory explains the various self-motivation factors of staffs in health care to stay positive about their work. Emotionally fulfilled workers perform better than their counterparts as they can cope with situations that occur in the workplace. The ability to deal with diverse situations enhances employee engagement that in turn improves the quality of care offered to patients.
The real improvements in company performance theory explain that institutions that use less force on employees encourage their engagement. When the staff engagement bar is raised, workers tend to perform better in their work, and this explains why fulfilling emotional factors is crucial to improving the quality of services offered by health care professionals.
Relationship between employee engagement and healthcare quality
Improving the care of patients is at present the healthcare priority. The interaction between the patients and healthcare employees can often determine the patient satisfaction that influences this reimbursement. The healthcare firms must therefore find better ways of improving the quality of compensation that it gives it employees (Varia, 2005).
In our organization, the current employee engagement tools do not provide the nurse leader with adequate information regarding employees. The new balanced score card proposed in this paper will be a useful measure to enhance service delivery after implementation.
Plans to Improve Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is quite important because employees who feel engaged will be looking forward and feel happy coming back to work each morning. So as to improve employee's engagement the first step will be to use the right employees in the engagement survey. The data that will be collected from the employees ought to be actionable, relevant and specific. The data will also have to be proved so that it can influence the major performance metrics (Kocherlakota, 2015).
Secondly, we will focus on engagement at both the organizational and local level. The departmental leaders will have to work with all employees so that they identify all the engagement opportunities and barriers in order to effect positive change. Employees are more familiar with the firm's customers, products and systems. Getting their ideas will be essential in improving business innovations and deliver improved performance in the workplace.
Lastly, the health facility will also coach the departmental leaders so as to hold them accountable for the employee's engagement. The health facility will have to coach all the managers to that they can take an active role in employee engagement building. We will track the record so that we make sure that we are emotionally engaging all employees (Chandani, Mehta, Mall, & Khokhar, 2016).
Leaders are the best strategy that can drive employee engagement. The leaders should come up with ways of communicating the enjoyment throughout the financial year and share their best practices across the entire organization. Leader must use each available opportunity to communicate and touch point every channel so as to recognize and reinforce the overall healthcare's commitment to employee's engagement.
References
Acknowledgement to Reviewers of Healthcare in 2015. (2016). Healthcare, 4(1), 12. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare4010012
Chandani, A., Mehta, M., Mall, A., & Khokhar, V. (2016). Employee Engagement: A Review Paper on Factors Affecting Employee Engagement. Indian Journal Of Science And Technology, 9(15). http://dx.doi.org/10.17485/ijst/2016/v9i15/92145
Health Care Financial Management for Nurse Managers: Merging the Heart with the Dollar. (2017). Google Books. Retrieved 11 May 2017, from https://books.google.co.ke/books?id=cB14U-R3LCoC&pg=PA62&dq=healthcare+balanced+scorecard&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=healthcare%20balanced%20scorecard&f=false
Kocherlakota, S. (2015). Employee Commitment: A Giant Leap in Employee Engagement. OPUS: HR Journal, 6(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.21863/opus/2015.6.1.003
People Metrics, "Employee Engagement Trends Report," 2011, The Web http://info.peoplemetrics.com/hs-fs/hub/221727/file-2078153457-pdf/PDFs/2011_Employee_Engagement_Trends_Report_PeopleMetrics.pdf
White, Gillian, "Millennials in Search of a Different Kind of Career," The Atlantic, The Web < https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/millennials-job-search-career-boomers/395663/>
Varia, K. (2005). A balanced approach [balanced scorecard]. Manufacturing Engineer, 84(2), 40-43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1049/me:20050207
