[Health center. Small hospital restructures. Interview by Kirsten Bjørnsson].
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All state mental health authorities are restructuring the role of their state psychiatric systems as part of the overall system of specialty psychiatric services. These efforts include shifting funds to community programs, changing the hospital from both a short- and long-term facility to one or the other, and giving community programs more administrative and budgetary authority over the hospitals. This paper presents case studies of five such efforts, selected to illustrate the range of change and the mechanisms for achieving it. Inferences are drawn from these studies and directions for research are suggested.
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The pressures of the current nursing shortage have created an unparalleled opportunity to restructure hospital nursing practice and care delivery. The potential exists to create new systems which simultaneously advance the goals of the profession and solve the problems of the shortage. Part 1 of this article (JONA, July/August, 1989) examined the similarities and differences among existing models and described the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital ProACT model. Part 2 outlines the process of developing and implementing ProACT, an alternative nursing practice and care delivery model.
Consultants were busy helping hospitals build complex financial structures to take advantage of the economic trends of the 1980s. Now many hospitals are quietly reversing those moves.
Serving patients in the SNF who need specialized, highly skilled care demands strong commitment, intensive planning, cooperative research, and continuous reassessment and evaluation. Specialty care programs are necessary to provide viable alternatives to acute care hospitalization for patients who need long term care. Health care organizations should continue their cooperative efforts to ensure the appropriate and cost effective use of services. Based on CCM's successful history of operating special care programs, providers should be encouraged to become leaders in developing specialized care alternatives. The appropriate use of long term care as well as acute care settings is in the best interest of patients, communities, and the health care industry itself.
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Fitness and wellness programs can be a strategic extension of a hospital's services, assist in attracting totally new patients to a facility, and help improve a hospital's image.
Not all rural hospitals are in a depressed financial situation. Many can and have achieved financial performance levels which match their urban counterparts. Cost control is the single most important management strategy which differentiates the successful from the unsuccessful rural hospital. Labor productivity is much higher in the financially successful rural hospital than in the unsuccessful hospitals. Reduced length of stay is also especially critical in the overall cost containment program.
To remain competitive, many not-for-profit hospitals have turned to joint ventures with for-profit and other not-for-profit entities. The authors examine the organizational structures that are used most often to form joint ventures (contractual agreements, subsidiary corporations, partnerships, and not-for-profit title-holding corporations), as well as the advantages and disadvantages associated with each form. Nurse executives must be aware of the opportunities that joint ventures provide their institutions. These arrangements can help improve and expand services and profitability.
Can hospitals successfully embark on large-scale organizational change without using outside consultants? Nursing administrators have an intense interest in the answer to this question. If change can be designed from inside the organization, the chances are greater that the change will fit better with the organization as a whole, and that buy-in by staff will be significant. The authors review the elements that need to be in place to conduct a successful change process internally, and support their concepts with a case study.
The primary aim of this study was to compare and contrast the predivestiture managerial and market characteristics of the following: Divested and nondivested hospitals of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) and American Medical International (AMI). The findings indicated that HCA hospitals with 1) lower occupancy rates, 2) less growth in revenues, 3) higher debt to total asset position, 4) fewer beds, 5) less growth in their elderly populations, and 6) less growth in their markets' per capita incomes had a higher probability of being divested into HealthTrust. The results for the AMI model were similar to those for the HCA model. AMI hospitals with 1) fewer beds, 2) less growth in their markets' per capita incomes, 3) lower salary expenses per discharge, 4) lower occupancy rates, and 5) increased growth in populations had a higher probability of being divested into EPIC.
Managed care organizations have become significantly involved in health care in the Denver metropolitan area. Their presence has challenged psychiatric hospitals to reduce costs and length of stay. In 1990, a locked private psychiatric unit was reorganized into locked, open, and partial care services through which patients progress at individualized rates. One treatment team manages patients in all settings, allowing a reduction in staffing costs and flexibility in treatment design. The hospital administration takes an active role in facilitating collaborative decision making between hospital clinicians and managed care representatives. In the first year after reorganization, length of stay was significantly reduced; 90 percent of patients were discharged from 24-hour care within ten days or less, whereas only 40 percent were discharged within that time in the original program. Staffing costs were reduced by 15 percent. No increase in recidivism was noted.
While broad parallels have been noted between the current "corporatization" of health care and developments in U.S. manufacturing in the late 19th century, there has been little in-depth analysis of these parallels. This article explores trends in the industrial organization of the hospital industry from the perspective of the manufacturing experience. Efforts to use corporate managerial techniques to rationalize hospitals have played an important role in the development of the modern structure of the hospital industry since the 1920s. But the emergence of multihospital systems is a new phenomenon. Some significant similarities exist between current conditions in the hospital industry and conditions in manufacturing at the time of the great industrial merger boom at the turn of the century. The subsequent experience of multiplant manufacturing firms created during the great industrial merger boom varied considerably. The characteristics of successful industrial consolidations are not present in the hospital industry; but motives for consolidation exist that were not present in manufacturing, while changes in the organization of production loom in the future.
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The reform decentralizing the special care of the mentally retarded in Norway has caused concern within the Norwegian psychiatric community. The frequency of psychiatric disturbances and behaviour problems in this population is known to be high, and closing down special institutions may eventually direct more mentally retarded persons to psychiatric hospitals. Behaviour problems like poor communication skills, lack of social skills and self-care, and disruptive behaviours seem to cause more concern than the actual diagnosis. However, the same behaviour problems are found in psychiatric hospital populations, for instance among chronic schizophrenics. From a behaviour modification point of view these behaviours can be treated regardless of diagnosis. The article describes how a psychiatric hospital unit can apply behaviour modification resulting in a better life for an otherwise untreatable patient. It is recommended that behaviour modification techniques should be used concurrently with other methods of treatment used in psychiatry. As well as being potentially helpful to psychiatric patients, behaviour modification techniques will make psychiatry better equipped to treat mentally retarded people in need of psychiatric care.