Change management is all about coping with complexity of the health care process. This is one of the vital components of the whole Health Management, as modern medicine always changes and evolves according to modern social standards and requirements.
Health care management change is dealing with process complexity: “It is about evaluating, planning and implementing operations, tactics and strategies and making sure that the change is worthwhile and relevant” (Al-Abri, 2007, n.p.). Taking this definition into account, it is easy to understand, that such change demands much efforts and time, once every step will be processed and evaluated. It is a question of both: technological change and people-oriented solutions; furthermore, the final result should be the combination of those (Al-Abri, 2007, n.p.).
There are different types of changes, such as: rare, occasional, sporadic and continuous. Continuous changes are easy to predict, therefore all necessary steps can and should be taken, once rare or sporadic changes, which mostly relates to health care ones, appears spontaneously and more likely become a failure. One of the factors for failure – lack of vision – is just because of sporadic change type, as there is no sufficient time frame to create this vision. Other factors are: lack of top management commitment, not carefully planned the way of implementation, lack of proper communication between organizations etc. (Al-Abri, 2007, n.p.). Even if change was predicted, all necessary actions were taken and it was successfully implemented in Health Care organization, still it is necessary to explain to employees why those changes has been made and how they will influence on them. Otherwise, it may lead to distraction inside the collective or even to paranoia and confusion (Al-Abri, 2007, n.p.).
The way how heath care organization faces change is also depends on the number of employees there and they perform. If the organization’s structure is hierarchical and bureaucratized, then it takes much more efforts to address change as this organization is less flexible and less amenable to re-consider the way of work. Such organization will never get the maximum from its workers as they are less likely to show their best, once they are pushed to do only what has been decided by the senior management (Al-Abri, 2007, n.p.). Thus, companies’ leaders have to become aware of how the change must be managed, rather than wait until this change will manage the organization itself. Top managers should establish the exact method or methods how the organization is going to face the change and cope with (Al-Abri, 2007, n.p.). Moreover, it is very important to set the person or even a team, depending on the scope of organization, which will be responsible for the change process.
References
Al-Abri, R. (2007). Managing Change in Healthcare. Oman Medical Journal, 22(3). Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3294155/, accessed on June 26th, 2015.
