Interview with a Health Care Provider

I've worked mainly with larger facilities in metropolitan areas, where the problem is diversification as well as identifying specific needs for care. Obviously, as our population grows older, more managed care is needed. But, for regular care, we need to departmentalize and specialize.

Would you explain what you mean by those terms?

To begin with, we need to provide different kinds of services. Services for the acutely ill, the chronically ill, ambulatory patients, after-surgical care, and even provide assistance with after-care in the home. Each of these departments requires its own supervisory staff and nursing and attendants, as well as doctors. We have always tried to avoid staffing that is the jack-of-all-trades, and master of none. There is more to managing a health care facility than merely treating patients, of course. That means, we need to develop certain goals and strategies, which include financial situations that permit us to be profitable, if at all possible, or at least not turn into a red-ink bleeding organization.

How do you develop goals and strategies? And, who does the developing?

We certainly don't just set up figures and expect to match them. More importantly, we need to make sure everyone is on board, and knows what we expect- in terms of performance. On a regular basis we

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s. At the same time, patient comments in one department may be useful for another area of our facility to learn about and, if they're not doing so already, put it into practice. What are your feelings about all the increased paperwork that insurers, and Medicare and others now require? (LAUGHS) I have always hated paper work, even when it was called "homework" in school. But, it is obviously a necessity. So, we have upgraded our electronic maintenance and billing system, as well as patient records. Of course, one of the keys here is invasion of privacy. We make sure that our records are not accessible to just anyone. I'd like to focus on the subject of leadership for a minute. How would you define a leader? That's easy! A leader is someone who sets goals and then goes about meeting them, and developing a team to help him meet those goals. You say a leader must have a good team, what qualities are necessary to do that? First of all, a leader has to be accessible. He not only has to pick good people he can rely on. But the opposite is true, too. His people have to rely on his judgment, his ethics and his abilities. Let me go further than just being accessible. He has to be a good listener. Oops. I
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Approximate Word count = 1442
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)