External Environment Assessment

Running head: EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT ASSESSMENT
External Environment Assessment
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT ASSESSMENT
Introduction
Every organization has its own culture and everything that affects the ability of an
organization to respect and compete with the changes successfully with-respect to the
external environment affects the overall failure and success of the organization. The main
external environmental factors that affect an organization include political, economic,
technological and social (Fernandez & Rainey, 2017). The following external environment
assessment is based on development of the report over the external environmental factors that
affecting the delivery of care and marketing of a selected healthcare organization. In this
report, the main healthcare organization of choice is Sentara Leigh Hospital.
About the hospital
Sentara Leigh Hospital (2019) is located in the Norfolk, Virginia, USA. The hospital
is equipped with 250 beds and is specialized in orthopedic, gynecological and urological
services.
Affect of the external environment factors
The politics of Virginia have gone through a series of historical events and chance in
demographics. During the latter half of the 21st century, the northern part of Virginia is
colonized with educated people along with immigrants while many areas becoming liberal in
attitudes of voting. The southern part of Virginia is more rural and conservative. Norfolk is
located in the southeastern part of Virginia and thus it can be said that it is colonized with
rural and orthodox people. Gardner, Johnson and Wiehe (2015) are of the opinion that
conservative people from the rural area are more inclined towards contemporary medicines
and the less likely to take avail healthcare access spontaneously. This conservative thought
process creates a gap in the usage of the overall healthcare services of Sentara.

EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT ASSESSMENT
Norfolk, Va. is regarded as the cultural and commercial center of Hampton Roads.
Hampton Roads is the major military center for the United States Navy, it also has several
commercial ports, known as a tourism spot and has headquarters of companies like
BlackHawk Products Group (Magnini, Calvert and Walker 2018). Thus from the economic
perspectives, Norfolk is diverse a this helps the hospital to attract a diverse group of the
healthcare service users and this is the reason why Sentara hospital is brimmed with advanced
services like advance imaging service, neuroscience and comprehensive breast care services.
Under technological and social perspectives, it can be stated that hospital provides
services with significant technological advancement for example providing a comprehensive
care for the breast cancer patient. Their website has a detailed tabulation about patient
information, billing information and visitors information that can be accessed online
depending on the patients’ or the administrative login. Under the social ground, it can be
stated that hospital is responding to the gender equity issues by reviewing the salaries of both
the male and female nurses and the doctors. This is the reason why Sentara Leigh Hospital
has received Magnet recognition from the American Nurses Credentialing Center in the year
2015 for excellence on the nursing turnover and advancement in the implementation of
advanced nursing interventions (Sentara Leigh Hospital, 2019). This external recognition
coming national agencies can be regarded as the external factors promoting organizational
development.
The first five apparent threats that the organization might experience
(i) Lack of proper healthcare utilization among the immigrants
(ii) The difficulty in installation of the medical equipments to location or lack of
transportation