Essay Greater Matonga Hospital – Medical Workforce Report – Management Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

Option 1:
Greater Matonga Hospital (GMH) is an 850-bed major hospital in the outer area of Melbourne, Australia. It not only serves the outer suburbs of Melbourne but also the neighbouring country towns. The hospital not only holds facilities for treatment in the disciplines of Medicine, Surgery and specialised areas such as obstetrics and gynaecology, cardiology..etc but also incorporates a polyclinic in the hospital premises. 

The four main routes of admission for the hospital are from:

1. The Emergency Department
2. The Outpatient Specialist Clinics
2. Transfer from other hospitals and
3. The Polyclinic or referral from other primary care clinics.

You have been recently appointed as one of the two Operations Managers in the hospital with your responsibility covering the Outpatient Specialist Clinics and the Polyclinic. Patients are either visiting the clinics for follow-ups or for the first time. You have been asked by your Executive Director to review the appointment system and follow-up scheduling in the clinics. You identify significant issues in your review. The issues include inadequate staff to complete enrolment of the patients if they are visiting the first time, inadequate general practitioners in the polyclinic leading to delays in seeing a doctor, a weak follow-up system with the Outpatient Specialist Clinics with many patients missing appointments, poor communication system between the clinics and the inpatient wards if a patient was to be booked for elective surgery or acute medical admission, and inadequate planning for a growing number of random arrivals.

You discuss this with your Executive Director who asks you to write a report outlining solutions to address the issues as mentioned above. Use your learning about queuing processes, process redesign and primary care booking and appointment systems to frame your response (maximum 2000 words). Include a background section where you review the literature to set a context. When you present solutions you need to reference your solutions to literature (both unit readings and external literature). Submit your response in a Word document before the due date.  

Option 2:

A recent medical workforce report outlined there were 325 doctors per 100,000 population in metropolitan Australia but only 142 per 100,000 population in rural Australia. Coupled with this medical workforce shortage, recruitment and retention is a problem in rural healthcare facilities including rural hospitals. Further, funding for rural hospital delivery has over the years become hard to obtain. These factors mean that the efficient and effective use of resources has become paramount in the management and delivery of rural hospital services.

Tragerfield Integrated Healthcare Centre (TIHC) is located in the rural town of Tragerfield (population: 22,000), Western Australia. TIHC consists of a 210-bed hospital and a primary care clinic with allied health facilities. TIHC  services a catchment (60,000) larger than the town’s population as it services neighbouring farming and mining communities. The Chief Executive (CE) of the TIHC has written to the Western Australian Department of Health to fund the hospital workforce and infrastructure to meet the growing demand from patients. The Department is not convinced that funding will address the issues at TIHC. The Department tasks you, a Business Improvement Manager, to visit TIHC and review the facility to check if funding will address the issue or if there are other solutions.

When you visit TIHC and review the facilities including the patient pathway and care plans you identify the issue is not so much a resource shortage but lack of efficient use of existing resources. You note several issues with handover and transfer of patients from the ED to the inpatient wards and empty operating theatres while elective surgery patients continue to see cancellations or delays in surgeries. Similarly, you note that the communication and referral system between the primary clinic and the hospital is weak when the clinic could have played a huge role in preventive hospital admissions. Further, poor quality management practices in the hospital coupled with poor utilisation of technological resources including IT has resulted in poor patient outcomes.

You consider writing up a strategy for the CE of TIHC to address these issues. You intend to draw upon your Business Process Reengineering, Business Process Improvement, Change Management and Systems Thinking learning from HME712 in writing up the report. Use this learning to frame your response (maximum 2000 words) in a Word document. Include a background section where you review the literature to set a context. You need to reference your solutions to literature (both unit readings and external literature).