The Essence of Healthcare Management

This article discusses the essence of healthcare management, focusing on the challenges within the current practice, scope for improvement and innovation, and key factors affecting health service delivery. The National Health Service (NHS) is used as a case study to illustrate these concepts. The challenges include the lack of implementation of latest technology, privacy and security concerns, rising costs, and inadequate staff training. The scope for improvement lies in quality improvement and the adoption of patient-oriented systems. Key factors affecting health service delivery include advancements in technology and regulatory challenges.

The Essence of
Healthcare Management

Contents
INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY.............................................................................................................................................3
About the Organization...........................................................................................................................3
Challenges within current practice...........................................................................................................4
Scope for improvement or innovation.....................................................................................................6
Key factors affecting health service delivery...........................................................................................8
Service Blueprint...................................................................................................................................10
CONCLUSION........................................................................................................................................11
REFERENCES........................................................................................................................................12

INTRODUCTION
Healthcare management can be defined as the administration and management of
healthcare systems, hospitals, public health systems as well as the entire hospital network. It is
the responsibility of doctors as well as nurses to provide quality services to help them in
recovering quickly (AlJaberi, Hussain and Drake, 2020). There are many benefits of effective
health care management, for instance it helps in creating various job openings and allow the
healthcare professionals to work across various settings. Organization chosen for this report is
National Health Service or NHS, which is a public healthcare organization headquartered in
London, United Kingdom. The company was founded in the year 1948 by Aneurin Bevan. The
report explains the various challenges within the current practice along with the current practice
as well as scope for innovation and improvement. The report also includes an explanation about
the key factors affecting health service delivery such as population, socio-economic factors and
regulations.
MAIN BODY
About the Organization
The National Health Service or NHS is a publicly funded healthcare organization based
in London, United Kingdom. The organization provides various healthcare services to all the
citizens of the UK based on their medical care needs. The organization does not focus on the
ability of the individuals to pay for the medical care that they require and instead aims to
continuously improve the quality of care facilities and help in creating the safest as well as
highest quality health care services to the individuals in need. People who are classed as ordinary
residents in the country are liable of receiving free treatment for their health problems. The major
healthcare services provided by the National Health Service include consultation with the general
practitioner, hospital treatment in case o9f accident and emergency, minor injuries treatment,
maternity services, treatment with a specialist etc. The National Health Service specializes in
cancer, mental health, diabetes as well as psychological therapies (Ben Ayed and El Aoud,
2017). The organization aims to provide the best healthcare services to the patients and because
of this, it recruits highly qualified as well as experienced health care professionals across
different sectors. This helps the company in serving the citizens of the United Kingdom in an
effective manner and promote good health across the nation.

Challenges within current practice
Healthcare is one of the most sensitive industries as it is directly connected to all
individuals. NHS is a healthcare organization which is publicly funded and provides various
services to the residents of the UK. There are many challenges that the company faces within its
current practice. Due to this, the organization’s services are getting impacted. With the
advancements in technology, the delivery of healthcare services is changing constantly. National
Health Service is facing issues currently with delivering healthcare services to the individuals
with different medical care needs (Chuang and Howley, 2017). This is because the company has
not implemented the latest technology which can help it in delivering services to people. The
different software applications that are used by healthcare organizations involve various software
that include artificial intelligence and machine learning. The healthcare workers working at the
organization currently, are not completely aware of the methods to use the software systems.
Besides this, the use of connected medical devices as well as Artificial Intelligence-integrated
software application provides massive amounts of data which the organization is currently facing
issues dealing with.
There is a threat for the company relating to the privacy and security of the data which is
collected by it. More and more healthcare organizations are moving towards digitization in order
to reduce or eliminate any kind of unnecessary human efforts. But NHS is still running on
traditional methods of service delivery. This is impacting its overall services as well as position
against private healthcare organizations. Another challenge that the organization is facing is
related to rising costs of the health care equipment. The company currently lacks a trained and
experienced staff. Due to this, it is the customers have complained of not receiving a good
experience. This is one of the major challenges that the company is currently facing. The
employees feel that they do not receive adequate mentoring and training at the workplace due to
which they are not able to work in an effective manner (Conway, Coyle and Sonnenfeld, 2017).
also, there is a lack of staff on the whole due to which the patients have to wait for long time in
order to receive the medical care. Due to this, the level of workload has also increased on the
employees who are currently working for the National Health Service or NHS.
The crisis related to costs in the healthcare industry is not new and this affects the
operations of most organizations. National Health Service has also faced challenges due to the

same because it is a public organization. The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has led to a serious
cost crisis for the company and impacted its business in a significant manner. recent studies have
shown that due to a lack of staff, the existing employees are dealing with huge load of work. As
a result, they are not able to address the needs of individual patients effectively. the culture of the
organization is also one of the factors that is posing challenge to the workers. There are no
flexible working schedules for the employees due to the huge amount of work that they are
expected to do. Also, currently, the management of the company is not focusing on providing
effective training to its employees (Costa and et.al., 2017). Due to this, they are frustrated and
confused about their respective jobs. This has further impacted their level of satisfaction with
their jobs and due to this many of the current employees are looking for other opportunities. As
NHS serves a large population of the United Kingdom, it is important for the management of the
company to remain updated about the latest trends as well as medical advancements within the
industry.
Nearly twenty percent of healthcare experts felt challenged by using an inadequate
amount of time spent with sufferers, in line with the survey. Based on some other CareerBuilder
ballot, fifty-seven percentage of healthcare professionals said the quantity of companies per
patient had gotten worse within the last three hundred and sixty-five days (as compared to 32
percentage who said it had stayed the same, and eleven percentage who idea it had advanced).
When nurses have been asked the same question, 69 percentage said the provider-affected person
ratio had gotten worse, and only 4 percent notion it had stepped forward (The Top 10 Challenges
Facing Healthcare Workers, 2020). The loss of time with sufferers may be exacerbated by
means of an overload of administrative obligations or non-medical assignments; 19 percentage of
people felt challenged through too many administrative obligations, while 14 percent were pissed
off through a loss of interesting assignments. Apart from this, currently the respective
organization, is also facing issues because people are increasingly becoming dependent upon
private healthcare service providers.
The cost crisis in healthcare isn't new. There are many stakeholders who play a key role
in determining the price of healthcare services, ranging from tool producers to clinical drug
production companies and payers to coverage policy companies. Conflict is natural while such a
lot of stakeholders are worried (Gopee and Galloway, 2017). And developing a consensus

requires strategic making plans and time. The rising price of healthcare directly influences the
sales of the healthcare agencies, as accelerated price discourages patients in lots of approaches,
from taking lab tests to doing ordinary follow-united states of America post go to, which
ultimately leads to bad patient final results. Therefore, these are some of the challenge s that the
respective organization is facing in its current practice. Regulatory challenges affect healthcare
groups in two approaches: one is it drives up the value of healthcare offerings and 2d is it creates
confusion amongst most people, that's required to be addressed in a particular and proper manner
to keep away from lawsuits.
Scope for improvement or innovation
There is a wide scope for improvement as well as innovation within the healthcare
industry as the patients’ demands are increasing day by day (Iyengar and El-Nahas, 2020).
Regulatory demanding situations have an effect on healthcare companies in strategies: one is it
drives up the fee of healthcare offerings and second is it creates confusion among the general
public, it really is required to be addressed in a selected and proper way to avoid court cases.
There are different ways through which healthcare services can be improved. Quality
improvement is the framework which is usually used in order to improve the ways in which
healthcare services are delivered to the patients. One of the ways to do so is to implement latest
technology which can help in improving the way in which services are delivered. Improving
affected person care has grown to be a concern for all fitness care companies with the general
goal of attaining a excessive diploma of patient delight. Greater recognition a few of the public,
growing call for higher care, keener opposition, extra fitness care regulation, the rise in medical
malpractice litigation, and situation about bad consequences are elements that make
contributions to this alteration.
The quality of affected person care is largely determined via the exceptional of
infrastructure, excellent of training, competence of personnel and efficiency of operational
structures (Jones and et.al., 2018). The essential requirement is the adoption of a gadget this is
‘patient orientated’. Existing troubles in fitness care relate to each clinical and non-scientific
factor and a complete device that improves each factor should be implemented. Health care
systems in growing countries face a good extra project due to the fact nice and price recovery
should be balanced with identical possibilities in patient care. For example, a application known

as Improving Chronic Illness Care run by way of the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound
makes a specialty of improving care for people with continual illnesses. Our health care shipping
machine normally focuses on acute care; the system is geared in the direction of treating
infectious sicknesses and acute traumas. There is a mismatch, however, between that version and
the prevalence of sickness, predominantly persistent illnesses that require a specific version of
care with distinct factors.
A chronic care version of health care delivery includes linkages between the fitness
system and the network, as well as guide for self-care and self-control (Khatoon, 2020). A health
care transport machine organized for continual care need to offer choice-aid tools for companies
and for patients and households. It should even have a helping records infrastructure; similarly,
the fitness care delivery group need to be redesigned and retrained. The foundation has provided
$32 million to help tasks, studies, and demonstrations and offer technical help to sell a health
care device configured to treat persistent ailments. A program known as Smoke Free Families
makes a specialty of the dissemination of high-quality practices. The purpose of this system is to
put off, or at the least lessen, smoking by pregnant girls, one of the most vital, modifiable hazard
factors for premature births. Everyone recognizes that prenatal smoking is a problem, but the
adoption of validated, powerful interventions has not been a hit. We offer commands for vendors
to assess the scenario and propose women to stop smoking at some point of prenatal visits.
The current health care machine’s overall performance may be defined with the aid of its
policies, rules, policies, enabling technologies, working fashions, customs, and affected person
and provider choices; collectively, those factors contain the frontier of what's possible. They also
function the limitations to what can be done. For a way too lengthy the fitness care industry’s
performance, in spite of attempts to spur development, has remained at the threshold of the
frontier. The enterprise wishes to interrupt present day constraints and amplify the frontier to
achieve genuine step forward overall performance. While the restrictions are many, the
conventional, dominant, fee-for-service (FFS) fee version, mainly, does not align issuer
incentives with the purpose of achieving extra for less. NHS should implement latest technology
in order to serve the citizens of the United Kingdom in a much more effective way so that they
can live a healthy life.

An extra convenient way for consumers to get right of entry to and growth self-care at the
same time as potentially lowering workplace visits and travel time; might also save you
complications and emergency room visit. Innovation’ denotes new, better, extra powerful
approaches of solving issues (Liao and et.al., 2020). Adopted from the enterprise, technology,
and advertising and marketing industries, the term has been used to explain guidelines, systems,
technologies, thoughts, services, and products that offer solutions to existing healthcare
problems. With many dynamic methods and methods to be had, the word ‘progressive’ has been
coined as a buzzword within the field of healthcare. What has been absent from discussions
round innovation is a clear, common information of what the time period way (Makarenko and
et.al., 2020). A clean definition is essential because loss of consensus acts as a barrier to bringing
innovation to scientific exercise. Due to a lack of clarity and consistency, the term ‘innovation’
has been regularly used inappropriately to explain exceptional developments within healthcare.
Therefore, it can be said that there is a wide scope for innovation as well as improvement in the
healthcare industry.
Key factors affecting health service delivery
It is important for the healthcare industry to provide the best services to the individuals in
order to promote a healthy living. The health service delivery is affected by various factors
which are described below –
Advancements in technology - Technology is credited as having the most enormous
impact on healthcare spending increase, with studies figuring out it as the purpose in the back of
anywhere from 38 percentage to more than 65 percent of spending increase. Lack of
implementing latest technologies can lead to affecting the overall delivery of healthcare services
in a negative manner. Latest advancements in technology have made it easier for the healthcare
delivery settings to provide better services to the patients so that they can live healthy lives. One
of the most important advantages of the virtual revolution has been the capacity to save and
access records. Healthcare specialists can now retrieve patient records from anywhere
(Malaspina and et.al., 2019). Also, the intranet and internet have allowed healthcare
professionals to share medical statistics hastily with every other, ensuing in greater efficient
patient care. If the respective organization fails to implement the latest technology in its
workplace, there will be issues with communication among employees.

Prices of health products and services – The prices of various health products as well
as services have increased due to a rise in the raw materials of the same. This factor has impacted
the overall spending of the patients in order to receive medical care. Common people who are
not able to afford highly priced services find it difficult to get their treatment done. As a result,
the company will not be able to achieve its goals as well as objectives in an effective manner. as
a result, their overall health condition is not proper. Therefore, prices of health products as well
as services can said to be one of the most influential factors on health care.
Competition - A key position of opposition in health care is the ability to offer a
mechanism for lowering health care costs. Competition commonly removes inefficiencies that
would in any other case yield excessive manufacturing charges, which might be in the long run
transferred to sufferers via excessive health provider and shipping fees (Özer and et.al, 2019).
Competition in health care markets benefits customers because it enables contain charges,
enhance great, and encourage innovation. The Federal Trade Commission's activity as a
regulation enforcer is to prevent firms from accomplishing anti-aggressive behavior that harms
consumers.
Characteristics of the patients – Another key factors that can affect health service
delivery is the different characteristics of the patients. This is because the age as well as other
demographic factors can have an impact on the delivery of health services. There are various
impacts of the characteristics of the patients on the delivery of the healthcare services.
Socio-economic factors - Education is possibly the most primary SES aspect because it
shapes future occupational opportunities and incomes potential. It also offers know-how and
existence abilities that allow higher-knowledgeable individuals to benefit extra geared up access
to records and resources to promote fitness. To the volume that training is prime to health
inequality, policies encouraging greater years of training and supporting early formative years
education may have health benefits (Pinto and et.al., 2018). When policymakers debate the
merits of increasing get right of entry education, they rarely don't forget improvements inside the
fitness of the populace. In addition to supplying means for getting fitness care, better incomes
can offer better nutrition, housing, education, and exercise. Independent of actual earnings levels,
the distribution of profits inside countries and states has been related to fees of mortality. Nine
Although arguable, one explanation is that underneath funding in public goods and welfare and

the enjoy of inequality are each greater in greater stratified societies and that these, in flip, have
an effect on fitness.
Regulations - In the career of nursing, regulation is an important aspect in making sure
secure and competent practice. Because nursing exercise has a extensive effect on health care
shipping, affected person safety and affected person outcomes, regulation of the career and
person nursing exercise is important. Healthcare coverage influences now not handiest the fee
residents must pay for care, but additionally their get entry to care and the fine of care obtained,
that could have an effect on their ordinary health. Healthcare coverage includes the advent and
implementation of laws, regulations, and guidelines for dealing with country's healthcare gadget.
Because nursing practice has a large impact on health care shipping, patient safety and
affected person effects, law of the profession and individual nursing practice is necessary. The
practice of nursing is regulated on the kingdom degree via administrative guidelines (laws) and
civil approaches. Licensure is one approach of validating know-how and competence
(Sibounheuang, Olson and Kittiboonyakun, 2020). Individual states license and alter the
profession via their nursing boards, even as the National Council of State Boards of Nursing
works to create uniformity and consistency in nursing exercise and requirements. Many other
government companies—federal, nation and nearby—additionally trouble guidelines, standards
and steering to guarantee safe and suitable nursing care. At present the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services has little effect on correctional health care, except, for instance, when a
facility receives federal funding, inclusive of repayment for dialysis. However, which can
alternate as provisions of the health care reform law are carried out.
Service Blueprint
A service blueprint can be defined as a diagram that helps in visualizing the relationships
between various service components. These components can include processes and people. A
provider blueprint offers a beneficial framework for ongoing performance control of a
product/service. Regular opinions of purchaser comments and service measures towards the
blueprint can assist discover possibilities to improve the customer revel in and have a superb
effect on a business. When groups get together to paintings on projects or deliver a services or
products to a client, they are able to regularly find there’s no normally held view approximately
how everything works (Sousa and et.al., 2019). The blueprint enables get to that view and as it’s

being created, visible it assist people apprehend what other humans inside the group and across
the enterprise surely do, which in a few instances can be a bit of a revelation.
It can be absolutely helpful to get your blueprint up on a wall so people can gather around
a shared view they’ve evolved together and explore, percentage and explain how elements of it
paintings. I’ve wallpapered a reasonably huge region within the remaining couple of years and
by no means pass over the opportunity to speak to human beings who've stopped by using to take
a look. Those conversations frequently result in humans understanding a bit greater
approximately a selected consumer journey, or a request for help in something they’re doing
(Tomassi, Abbas and Klaristenfeld, 2019). The provider blueprint can provide a virtually
beneficial shape for conversations which allows human beings to navigate among extraordinary
degrees of element from strategic to specific. In a workshop surroundings it may help all people
control their awareness and keep away from confusion or at move purposes.
CONCLUSION
From the above report, it can be concluded that healthcare industry is one of the major
industries within a country. There are many private as well as public organizations that operate
within the industry and provide various health care services to the customers. But there can be
various challenges that these firms can face while offering services to the customers. Apart from
this, there are also certain factors that can have an impact on the overall delivery of health
services to the customers. There is a wide scope of improvement as well as innovation for health
care industry. This will not only help the organizations in providing the citizens of a nation with
quality services, but also enable the people to live a healthy life.

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