Healthcare stakeholders fall into two categories: internal and external ones. Internal stakeholders are usually hospital staff, who are directly involved in the hospital’s internal work. External stakeholders include suppliers who provide equipment and medication, patients since they directly benefit from hospital’s work and other interested groups. Strategic planning in healthcare is understood as setting specific goals for the hospital’s future development and working out a plan to meet these goals (Willis et al., 2018). It considers possible changes in the healthcare legislation and their possible impact on the organization. Strategic planning involves elaborating a plan and its execution, making decisions as to the best ways for this plan to be implemented, and defining the hospital’s mission, vision, and values.
Planning presupposes careful examination of the hospital’s performance within preceding years and elaborating methods to enhance this performance. The performance is assessed at different levels that include patients’ satisfaction, staff efficiency, financial output and many others. On the basis of the received data, strategic analysts discern areas in which hospital’s performance may be boosted.
Decision making involves choosing the best strategy for the hospital development in terns of patients’ satisfaction, number of cases cured; employee friendliness and financial prowess. The organization’s mission is built around the hospital’s ability to benefit society by providing patients with treatment that meets the highest medical standards. The vision of the hospital is the idea of how hospital’s work will be organized so that the organization is able to complete its mission. The organizational values comprise the fundamental beliefs on which the treatment processes are based. Strategic planning components play an essential role in meeting the stakeholders expectations, since they help to determine the vector of the hospital’s development considering the stakeholders interests and aspirations. Without strategic planning, stakeholders’ needs risk to go unnoticed and not incorporated in the system, which may result in bitterness on the internal and external stakeholders’ part.
Reference
Willis, G., Cave, S., & Kunc, M. (2018). Strategic workforce planning in healthcare: A multi-methodology approach. European Journal of Operational Research, 267(1), 250-263. Web.
