Building Organizational Capacity in Healthcare

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

HEALTHCARE 2
Introduction
The changing environment around the healthcare service provisions requires an
organizational structure that is flexible adaptable and offers quality service to patients. Several
organizational structures are rigid and prove to be immutable to changes and this is detrimental
for the contemporary health care environment. In addition, understanding the need for
community and clients is the primary reason why the type of organizational structure and
strategy is important. In this sense, health care facilities such as Whitlam Memorial Hospital
(WMH) are restructuring to meet the current dynamics and increase its capacity to deliver quality
health service. The following paper, therefore, analyses the current organizational structure and
presents an alternative organizational structure that will help in building the capacity to realize
strategic goals and objectives.
The strength of the current organizational structure
The traditional functional organizational structure is characterized by certain strengths.
These include increase expertise, good communication, proper coordination and increase
productivity of medical specialists. Firstly, the functional structure provides a good
communication environment that is vital for achieving WMH’s mission of high quality
healthcare. The organization is based on the function of employees and departments and this
makes communication effective. The structure is always characterized by procedure and
practices that follow a specific chain of command and this is good for effective communication
hence enable the company to achieve its vision (Sullivan & Decker, 2013). Secondly, the
functional organizational structure has good coordination within a single functional unit. The
communication strength of the functional organization structure is important for collaborative

HEALTHCARE 3
care which is goal of WMH hospital. Thirdly, the functional organizational structure ensures that
medical specialists are grouped together thereby enhancing expertise. Grouping medical
specialist together is important for organization to achieve its multidisciplinary care goal. Lastly,
the traditional or functional organizational structure makes it easy to increase the productivity of
medical practitioners due to specialization. Increase productivity is important for the plan of the
WMH hospital to increase bed capacity and other specialized care due to changing community
around (Huebsch, 2018).
The weakness of the current organizational structured
Despite the strength of the functional organizational structure, there are numerous
weaknesses of the structure that needs to be changed with current health dynamics. Firstly, long
decision-making time is one of the worse weakness of the functional structure that leads to slow
response during the emergency medical situation. With the current size of the hospital, a
functional organizational structure can work, when the hospital intends to expand from 130 to
250-bed number, the decision will be longer limiting this expansion plan (Umansky, 2016).
Secondly, a longer decision-making process may lead to the poor relay of message or wrong
information passage. Moreover, the bureaucratic nature of the functional organization is
characterized by a certain chain of command that may not be appropriate for WMH vision of
health experience with faster response. Thirdly, a functional organization structure is rigid and
cannot expand with the globalization phenomenon happening currently. The rigid nature of the
traditional organizational structure reduces the possibility to change depending on the
environment which is the vision of the WMH hospital. Lastly, grouping practitioners according
to the area of specialization lead to the limited chance of multidisciplinary care as most medical
practitioners only focus on their area of specialization. One of the goals of the WMH hospital is