Building Organizational Capacity in Healthcare

Running head: HEALTHCARE 1
Building organizational capacity in health care
Student Name
Institution

HEALTHCARE 2
Introduction
Capacity building remains an important recipe for development and healthcare
performance improvement. The organizational structure has the ability to limit or permit
organizational changes that are geared towards capacity building. A traditional or functional
organizational structure is an example of an organizational structure that has bureaucracies
limiting the expansion and leadership capacity building. In addition, the traditional
organizational structure reduces the ability of the organization to respond to the dynamic medical
environment characterized by diverse patient needs. Service line organizational structure focuses
on patients and is flexible enough to adapt to changes in the community environment. Whitlam
Memorial Hospital (WMH) plans to build the organizational capacity to respond to community
needs through the provision of quality healthcare services. The healthcare organization has
vision, mission, and goals that focus on patient-centered care and other specialized care. The
following paper explores the current WMH hospital organizational structure and a better
structure that allow achievement of the hospital vision, mission, and goals.
The strength of the traditional organizational structure
Bureaucratic organizational structure or functional organizational structure has the
strength that can help WMH hospital achieve goals, mission or vision. Firstly, traditional or
functional organizational structure has elaborated procedure and practices that enable the
hospital to direct its communication from the top management to the other functional units. This
is important for ensuring that medical practitioners are focused on the vision of the hospital. In
addition, the goal of the hospital is to provide specialized care to the changing population and

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this is possible through the functional organizational structure that provides areas for
specialization called functional units (Victorian public-sector commission, 2015).
Secondly, functional organizational structure increases specialization due to functional
grouping of the medical specialists and this is important for the planned increase bed capacity.
The WMH hospital plan to increase the bed capacity from 130 to 250-bed capacity and this
means there is need for increased service delivery. Functional organizational categorizes
specialists into functional departments that increase productivity in terms of service delivery.
Moreover, the traditional organizational structure enables collaboration between specialists of
the same department (Stanley, 2011).
Thirdly, traditional organizational structure increases the expertise that is necessary for
ensuring the mission of providing high-quality health care patients is achieved. The functional
organizational structure comes along with specialization and increases effectiveness and this
enables specialists to work together thus delivery of high-quality health care services to patients.
According to the WMH hospital, the vision of the hospital is to give patients a health experience
and this is possible through specialized medical care enhanced by the traditional organizational
structure (Huebsch, 2018).
The weakness of the traditional functional organizational structure
The traditional or functional organizational structure has been viewed as weaker to the
changing medical health environment in a number of ways. Firstly, bureaucratic organization is
characterized by a long chain of command that limits faster service delivery and this deters the
WMH hospital from achieving the vision of responding to changing needs (NSW Health, 2012).
The hospital has been providing emergency medical services to patients and is planning to

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increase the response rate and quality (Cummings, Bridgman & Brown, 2016). Strict decision-
making path that characterizes traditional organizational structure does not allow faster response
to these changes. Secondly, multidisciplinary and collaboration is an area within the hospital
goal that the organizations want to achieve and traditional organizational structure limit
multidisciplinary service due to specialization. In a functional structure, health specialist is
aggregated based on the area of expertise and this limit possibility of working with other
specialists from other fields (Marquis & Huston, 2015). Thirdly, the mission of the WMH
hospital is to provide quality health care service through a partnership with patients which are
not possible under a traditional organizational structure that follows a specific procedure. The
interaction between healthcare practitioners and patients is not easy in traditional organizational
structure since communication a specific procedure. Lastly, the communication within the
traditional organizational structure tends to be weaker due to bureaucracies of the organization
hence the poor quality of service. Medical service in the dynamic environment especially when
the hospital plans to increase bed capacity from 130-250 will be slow and of poor quality (Casali
& Day, 2010).
The alternative organizational structure
WMH need a responsive organizational structure that focuses on patient service delivery
through patient-centered care and the organizational structure that fits the hospital is the service
line structure. The service line organization is designed to focus on service rather than the
management of employees or the organization as a whole. Moreover, service line organizational
structure enables the organization to achieve its vision, mission, and objectives due to is
numerous strengths (Australian Council on Healthcare Standards, 2015).