Organizational Capacity of WMH Hospital: A Critical Analysis

This essay critically analyzes the organizational capacity of Whitlam Memorial Hospital (WMH), a 130-bed community hospital in Sydney, Australia, examining its current functional structure and proposing a shift to a service line structure to better meet the evolving needs of the community. The essay explores the strengths of the traditional organizational structure, such as its established procedures and specialization, which aids in directing communication and providing specialized care. However, it highlights the weaknesses, including a bureaucratic chain of command, limitations in multidisciplinary collaboration, and potential for weaker communication, especially as WMH plans to increase its bed capacity. The essay then advocates for a service line organizational structure, emphasizing its patient-centered approach, support for multidisciplinary teams, and flexibility in adapting to environmental changes. While acknowledging potential limitations like informal communication and the need for staff training, the essay concludes that a service line structure better aligns with WMH's vision, mission, and goals, particularly its focus on quality improvement, patient-centered care, and building organizational leadership capacity to respond to community needs and demographic changes. The essay uses various references to support its claims.

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

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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).

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The strength of the service line organization
Service line organizational structure focuses on the provision of services matching
patient-centered approach the WMH hospital intends to use. The hospital's mission of
partnership with patients is supported by service line structure that enhances collaboration with
the client for quality service (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care
2012). In addition, service line structure ensures that specialized care such as aged care is
delivered since the organizational structure is capable of responding to changes in service
needed.
Secondly, the multidisciplinary team is one of the strategic goals of the WMH and is
anchored on the interaction or collaboration across all levels within the organization. Service line
organizational structure encourages horizontal interaction between various stakeholders such as
patient's medical specialists and the community. This ensures effective multidisciplinary
teamwork especially during specialized treatment or emergency care. Patient-centered medical
care requires high collaborative medical teamwork that is only enhanced through service line
organization (Jacobs et al., 2012).
Thirdly, service line organizational structure allows quality improvement within the
service delivery and this is important for the realization of the vision of the hospital. The service
line organizational structure is flexible to changes in the environment and allows collaboration or
partnership with other health care facilities thus increasing the quality of the service delivery.
This increase the leadership development especially during discharge where partnership with
other specialist outside the hospital is important (Daly, Hill & Jackson, 2014).
Limitation of service line organizational structure

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Despite much different strength of the service line structure, there is some limitation of
the structure when applied in WMH hospital. Firstly, the service line organizational structure
make informal communication system hospital main communication channel and this weakens
the management. Service line organizational structure increase the informal communication
between management and the staffs or patients and this reduces the chance of directive
communication from management. In addition, horizontal communication makes it difficult for
management to communicate effectively with the staff (Janamian, Upham, Crossland & Jackson,
2016).
Secondly, service line organizational structure increases the need for high-quality service
that staff may not deliver leading to a high investment of staff training at the expense of the
organization. Effective implementation of the service line organizational structure requires high
staffs training and development in order to increase capability and quality. This requires more
investment for the vision of high-quality patient experience to success within the WMH hospital
(Foltin & Keller, 2012).
Why service line organizational structure better fit WMH hospital
Service line has some reason that makes the structure fit the current plan, vision, mission,
and goals of the organization. Firstly, the service line organizational structure is flexible to
changes in the environment and thus enables the organization to improve the quality of services
provided to patients (Downey, Roberts & Stough, 2011). Two driving forces for capacity
development of the healthcare facility are the changing demographic factors and patient’s needs.
Service line organization structure focuses on the patients or society demands including
demographic changes in the community (NCETA, 2017).

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Secondly, service line organizational structure allows organizational quality measurement
and improvement based on the service delivery system. The service line organizational structure
fits the context of the WMH hospital that seeks to improve quality of healthcare services through
multidisciplinary and patient-centered care. In addition, the mission of the hospital is to provide
the highest quality of service through a partnership that is easy through the service line structure
that has minimal procedures and practices (Davoren, 2019).
Thirdly, leadership capacity building and performance improvement which is the goal of
the WMH is possible through service line organizational structure (Dignam et al., 2012). Patient-
centered care and other specialized care such as aged care, cardiovascular, cancer, trauma and
pediatric require flexible service-centered approach and these open ways for building the
capacity of the healthcare facility. Furthermore, investing in service line organization increases
the ability of the organizational leadership to respond to the quality improvement requirement in
the health sector (Finkelman, 2016).
Fourthly, service line organizational structure allows over hospital capacity building that
is a key priority of the WMH hospital. Service line organizational structure has horizontal
interaction that allows organizational development, improvement of the institutional governance
and staff development. This makes service line better fit the plan of the organization to increase
bed capacity from 130 to 250, it allows multidisciplinary collaborative work and partnership
across all health care system (Baars, Evers, Arntz & van Merode, 2010).
In conclusion, organizational structure plays an important role in the achievement of the
goals, mission, and vision of the organization. Whitlam Memorial Hospital (WMH) is a
healthcare organization strategically responding to the changing community factors such as

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demographic and patient need. The traditional organizational structure used by the organization
has some disadvantages that need a patient-centered approach to improve the quality of health
services. The alternative organizational structure is a service line structure that focuses on the
provision of specialized quality care.
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