Building Organizational Capacity in Health Care

Running head: BUILDING ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY IN HEALTH CARE 1
Building Organizational Capacity in Health Care
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

BUILDING ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY IN HEALTH CARE 2
Introduction & Thesis
Organizational structures play significant roles in supporting an organization towards
achieving mission, vision, and strategic goals (Zaki, Hussien, Sanad & El-Khoriby, 2015). The
case study outlines about Whitlam Memorial Hospital (WMH) that constitutes of 130 beds and is
located in Sydney’s outer suburbs. This hospital provides obstetric, surgical, acute medical and
emergency services to the local residents. In the last decade, the hospital indicates an increase in
the number of patients due to the increase in the demographic population that entails older
persons at retirement age and young families. Notably, this hospital embraces a traditional,
functional (bureaucratic) type of organizational structure that fails to support the growing
community needs and a variety of services offered. Its vision statement states “Provide health
experiences that are able to respond to the changing community needs”. The mission also states
“To provide the highest quality, specialist healthcare in partnership with patients, caregivers,
community, and other healthcare professionals”. Lastly, WMH’s strategic goals are to ensure
that it achieves specialist and high performing organizational teams with matching healthcare
skills that can provide patient-centered and high-quality care that can be efficient and effective
towards responding to the changing health demands of the growing population. While evolution
is inevitable, the current organizational structure fails in supporting WMH’s mission, vision, and
goals sufficiently hence there is a need to adopt a new organizational structure considering its
strengths and weaknesses to ensure that it will sustain the hospital fully.
Traditional, Functional Type of Organizational Structure
Strengths
To begin with, a traditional, functional organizational structure stems from the small
businesses whereby the individual job tasks usually overlap and also, it does not have a strict

BUILDING ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY IN HEALTH CARE 3
management team (Schrader & Droegehorn, 2018). Due to evolution, this type of organizational
structure improves in productivity and efficiency as job grouping is performed to ensure various
departments specializes in specific functions (Jones, 2013). In the end, this organizational
structure has employees who are highly controlling, engaged in broader issues, and also, they
synthesize the subordinates’ efforts. By reviewing the WMH case study, this type of
organizational structure has significant strengths that support the mission, vision, and strategic
goals. For instance, a functional organizational structure establishes a surrounding for effective
communication as employees are linked to job context and functions. This means that the
employees in the same departments can comprehend the jargons of the vision and mission
statements, as well as the strategic goals to ensure the hospital is high performing. Such an
organizational structure ensures there is coordination as the employees can consult each other
about how to provide patient-centered and high-quality care that is efficient and effective based
on the growing health demands. The traditional functional type of organizational structure is
endowed with expertise as it practices division of labor that provides the employees with an
opportunity of being experts. Notably, this type of expertise is what that currently guides the
hospital towards restructuring to ensure health needs are well fulfilled based on the growing
needs of the increasing population. Lastly, traditional, functional type of organizational structure
contains efficiency and economy of scale that increases with its scope (Winter, Berente,
Howison & Butler, 2014). This type of organizational structure results in increased output and in
this case, the employees at WMH on meeting the patients needs to offer the best health
experiences through the establishment of high multidisciplinary teams on the organizations.
Weaknesses