Assignment 5: Managing Health Care Quality

Imagine that you are a hospital administrator at the Sunlight Hospital in California. The main complaint among the patients is the quality of care. Your job is to understand the state of the hospital, create value, increase efficiency, and turn the facility into a local hospital of choice. Whenever you are making visits in various wards to meet the employees and the patients, you hear how the patients love the hospital, but they would like to see certain improvements in care. The employees seem to be very busy executing their duties and not interacting much with the patients. The hospital board has asked you to compile a report of your findings and suggested strategy for achieving the hospital’s current goals.

Note: You may create and / or make all necessary assumptions needed for the completion of this assignment.

Write a four to six (4-6) page paper in which you:

Classify five (5) measurements of quality of care in a hospital, and justify the major reasons why you believe these measurements matter to patients in their process of choosing a hospital for emergency or inpatient care.

Specify four (4) main features in health care organizations that can be used to design a successful quality improvement plan. Articulate the significant manner in which the specified features can lead to failure or success of quality of care in Sunlight Hospital.

Suggest the salient reasons why quality of care would add value to and create a competitive advantage for the Sunlight Hospital. Justify your response.

Use four (4) recent (within the last five [5] years) quality academic resources in this assignment.Note: Wikipedia and other websites do not qualify as quality academic resources.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.