Managing Knowledge at an NHS Trust Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Managing Knowledge at an NHS Trust - Essay Example For this change to take place, the management needs to follow a change management process and provide incentives to the employees to stick with this change. Hopefully with this change, Reddix hospital can stand back on its feet and shine once again. Reddix Hospital is a trust hospital under national health services (NHS) in the United Kingdom serving over 900,000 patients in the area. It caters to many different medical fields and hence has to cater to an annual 7000 patients in admissions. With only 200 doctors whose expertise includes breast cancer, cardiovascular diseases, musculoskeletal diseases and pediatrics, the hospital finds itself short on employees and due to the recent nurse shortage, it finds itself unable to cater to all the patients are diligently as it like to. Also due to the inefficiencies and conventional systems, the hospital cannot cope up with the demands of the patients and the employees alike. Being a big hospital, Reddix faces many problems in the daily operations which it tries to address. In all its problems the integration between the departments was considered the biggest challenge. Since the hospital has many different departments that provide specialist information to the customers and as well as other departments, it needs to integrate its systems used in each department like Radiology Information Systems (RIS), Patient Administration System (PAS), Laboratory Information Systems (LIS), Clinical Patient Record (CPR), Pharmacy Systems (PS) and Nursing Systems (NS). Without the proper management and collaborative working, these departments can never truly achieve the desired efficiency and therefore effectiveness. Analyzing the situation, it is apparent that the hospital will needs an overhauling of the entire systems and the processes. Therefore a change strategy needs to be used in the scenario to free Reddix out of the crunch situation. It has to interoperate between the departments. In this context, it means that all business units must work in unison to create synergy and lead the organization to achieve operational efficiency. Recommendations The change process described by the psychologist Kurt Lewin in the early 20th century must be followed here. Let's see how this can be done (Lewin & Gold, 1999). 1) The first part of this change process in the unfreezing of the current norms of the organization. This means to change the people's sense of safety and feel a sense of control. The employees at Reddix have become used to the hospital norms and like that norm to remain the way it is. Breaking this norm is the key to success however due to non-commitment and resistance to change, this break though needs a systematic strategy. First of all the employees at the hospital must be made aware of need for change. This involves sending the employees to seminars, or having meetings where the need for change is discussed (Isaac, 2006). When the employees understand the need for change, then the actual changes must be brought along. 2) After the initial education of the employees, the actual changes must be enforced on the employees by giving them goals and objectives (Fred, 2006). According to the report by National Health Services,