Building Organizational Capacity in Healthcare: A WMH Analysis

This report examines the organizational capacity of Whitlam Memorial Hospital (WMH), a 130-bed facility in Sydney's outer suburbs, focusing on its ability to meet the evolving healthcare needs of a growing population. The report analyzes WMH's current traditional, functional organizational structure,...Read More

Running head: BUILDING ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY IN HEALTH CARE 1
Building Organizational Capacity in Health Care
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

BUILDING ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY IN HEALTH CARE 2
Introduction & Thesis
Organizational structures play significant roles in supporting an organization towards
achieving mission, vision, and strategic goals (Zaki, Hussien, Sanad & El-Khoriby, 2015). The
case study outlines about Whitlam Memorial Hospital (WMH) that constitutes of 130 beds and is
located in Sydney’s outer suburbs. This hospital provides obstetric, surgical, acute medical and
emergency services to the local residents. In the last decade, the hospital indicates an increase in
the number of patients due to the increase in the demographic population that entails older
persons at retirement age and young families. Notably, this hospital embraces a traditional,
functional (bureaucratic) type of organizational structure that fails to support the growing
community needs and a variety of services offered. Its vision statement states “Provide health
experiences that are able to respond to the changing community needs”. The mission also states
“To provide the highest quality, specialist healthcare in partnership with patients, caregivers,
community, and other healthcare professionals”. Lastly, WMH’s strategic goals are to ensure
that it achieves specialist and high performing organizational teams with matching healthcare
skills that can provide patient-centered and high-quality care that can be efficient and effective
towards responding to the changing health demands of the growing population. While evolution
is inevitable, the current organizational structure fails in supporting WMH’s mission, vision, and
goals sufficiently hence there is a need to adopt a new organizational structure considering its
strengths and weaknesses to ensure that it will sustain the hospital fully.
Traditional, Functional Type of Organizational Structure
Strengths
To begin with, a traditional, functional organizational structure stems from the small
businesses whereby the individual job tasks usually overlap and also, it does not have a strict

BUILDING ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY IN HEALTH CARE 3
management team (Schrader & Droegehorn, 2018). Due to evolution, this type of organizational
structure improves in productivity and efficiency as job grouping is performed to ensure various
departments specializes in specific functions (Jones, 2013). In the end, this organizational
structure has employees who are highly controlling, engaged in broader issues, and also, they
synthesize the subordinates’ efforts. By reviewing the WMH case study, this type of
organizational structure has significant strengths that support the mission, vision, and strategic
goals. For instance, a functional organizational structure establishes a surrounding for effective
communication as employees are linked to job context and functions. This means that the
employees in the same departments can comprehend the jargons of the vision and mission
statements, as well as the strategic goals to ensure the hospital is high performing. Such an
organizational structure ensures there is coordination as the employees can consult each other
about how to provide patient-centered and high-quality care that is efficient and effective based
on the growing health demands. The traditional functional type of organizational structure is
endowed with expertise as it practices division of labor that provides the employees with an
opportunity of being experts. Notably, this type of expertise is what that currently guides the
hospital towards restructuring to ensure health needs are well fulfilled based on the growing
needs of the increasing population. Lastly, traditional, functional type of organizational structure
contains efficiency and economy of scale that increases with its scope (Winter, Berente,
Howison & Butler, 2014). This type of organizational structure results in increased output and in
this case, the employees at WMH on meeting the patients needs to offer the best health
experiences through the establishment of high multidisciplinary teams on the organizations.
Weaknesses

BUILDING ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY IN HEALTH CARE 4
On the other hand, traditional, functional organizational structure is connected to various
drawbacks that hinder WMH towards achieving the vision statement, mission statement, and
strategic goals. First of all, low creativity is common with the traditional, functional structure as
the managers tend to be highly reluctant of the employees (Huczynski, Buchanan & Huczynski,
2013). The employees also tend to be discouraged from employing creative problem-solving
skills. In this case, the health professionals at WMH fail to deploy their skills to ensure the
hospital can respond to the changing health needs of the growing population. Additionally,
healthcare professionals also lack the creativity to develop ways of providing patient-centered
and high-quality care as the managers do not ensure keen supervision. Another drawback for this
type of organizational structure is that it is connected to high costs as it constitutes various
departments that are managed by managers who demand high salaries (Cummings & Worley,
2014). Based on the case study, WMH incurs high costs hence there is a need for performing
restructuring to ensure that it can meet the growing health needs of the increasing population.
Lastly, traditional, functional organizational structure is endowed with less happiness as some
employees lack the capacity to manage their working environment contributing to low autonomy
levels. Based on the case study, the healthcare professionals lack autonomy as the hospital
experiences low motivational levels hence its challenging to achieve the mission, vision, and the
outlined strategic goals with the current organizational structure. In this case, there is a need to
adopt a new organizational structure that can match the increasing health needs for the growing
population.
Innovative Type of Organizational Structure
Strengths

BUILDING ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY IN HEALTH CARE 5
WMH Hospital needs to adopt an innovative type of business structure that can meet the
growing health demands of the increasing population among older people and young families.
An innovative type of organizational structure ensures there are collaboration, coordination,
open-source software, and outsourcing that can shape an organization towards achieving its
mission statement, vision statement, and the strategic goals (Lakhani, Lifshitz-Assaf & Tushman,
2013). Various strengths of this type of organizational structure include a multidivisional
structure whereby the managers establish closer relationships with the customers (Klewitz &
Hansen, 2014). A multidivisional structure is required in the WMH to ensure that that can
provide patient-centered and high-quality care that can be efficient and effective towards
responding to the changing health demands of the growing population as outlined in the mission,
vision, and strategic goals respectively. Innovative organizational structure is also connected to
teams that embrace innovative minds and lead to the integration of ideas that might be
overlooked by leaders in the traditional, functional organizational structure (Büschgens, Bausch
& Balkin, 2013). Notably, WMH requires multidisciplinary teams that embrace specialist
services that can support in the provision of high-quality care and patient-centered care to meet
the changing health needs. Lastly, this type of organizational structure will support the hospital
towards executing projects that will contribute towards achieving the mission statement, vision
statement, and the outlined strategic goals.
Weaknesses
On the other hand, the innovative organizational structure is connected to various
weaknesses that may impose challenges to WMH hence it may fail to achieve its mission
statement, vision statement, and the outlined goals. For instance, the diverse teams established in
the hospital impact coordination as at some point, the structure is resistant to changes. This

BUILDING ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY IN HEALTH CARE 6
implies that the teams may fail to maintain effective communications with other departments as
they embrace different expertise (Autio, Kenney, Mustar, Siegel & Wright, 2014). For this
reason, WMH may have innovative health professionals who cannot support it towards providing
high-quality care that can match the patients’ needs. Another weakness is that the health
professionals in this hospital may have the same technical career paths hence there may be less
interaction. In this case, if the hospital adopts this type of an organizational structure, it may not
be in a position to sustain the health needs of the patients or sustain specialist care in connection
with the patients. However, the weaknesses for innovative organizational structure can be to
overcome if the hospital adopts it appropriately (Donate & de Pablo, 2015).
Why Innovative Organizational Structure Might be better for the Hospital
This type of organizational structure might be better as innovation is crucial to achieving
institutional growth (Kotsemir & Meissner, 2013). In this case, the hospital needs the innovative
organizational structure as it needs to establish teams to execute, develop, and generate new
ideas and solutions to sustain the growing health demands from the increasing population
particularly the young families and older persons. Therefore, the executives will need to share
the vision of the hospital that states “Provide health experiences that are able to respond to the
changing community needs”. Plans also need to be aligned with the mission statement that states
“To provide the highest quality, specialist healthcare in partnership with patients, caregivers,
community, and other healthcare professionals”. Innovation is crucial for every institution to
execute new ideas to achieve the outlined goals and thrive.
Conclusion
Whitlam Memorial Hospital adopts the traditional, functional approach that leads it to
face challenges towards sustaining the large population of the older persons and young families.

BUILDING ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY IN HEALTH CARE 7
To maintain high-quality services and patient-centered care, the hospital needs to adopt an
innovative organizational structure that can support it towards achieving its vision statement,
mission statement, and the outlined strategic goals. Organizational structure impacts the
performance and productivity of a firm hence WMH should consider adopting the innovative
organizational structure as it will help in addressing the prevailing issues. WMH can
communicate with its stakeholders to use innovation to streamline its communication process,
and also, organize big ideas to improve the quality of care and patient-centered care that is
efficient and effective to respond to the changing health needs of the patients.

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