I have a DREAM--how to run a hospital

[Jilly_in_VA]

for how to educate hospital administrators in the future. ALL of them. It goes like this.

There will be no such thing as a degree in Health Care Administration unless it includes the following:

As part of the curriculum, all students will have clinical as well as classroom education. Clinical education will be taught by nurses with advanced degrees and adjunct faculty in the following areas: radiology, laboratory, dietary, transport, and housekeeping. Students will, as part of this clinical education, serve in each department, either in direct patient care or by shadowing, and each student will show competency and be graded accordingly.
1. Each student will be certified as a nursing assistant and will work for 2 full semesters as a CNA, 4 credit hours per semester; supervision by clinical instructors and nursing personnel, just like nursing students get. This will be a lab course, so 8 hours per week.
2. As to other departments, each student will shadow skilled personnel in lab and X-ray (1 semester) and will work under the direction of adjunct faculty in dietary, housekeeping, and transport (1 semester)
3. Each student will spend one full year shadowing nurses in all departments (2 semesters) under the direction of nursing
clinical instructors.
Only then, and after all the classes in finance and administrivia, will they be fully qualified to understand how a hospital really runs.

We'd need a whole lot fewer "assistant CEO's"!

[global1]

1. Agreed - Only By Experiencing What Each Health Professional Encounters In Their Job....

will an administrator be able to understand what needs to be done to improve patient care in the hospital in each of their departments.

I'm surprised that this hasn't been instituted a long time ago.

The administrative student should also spend time with patients and their significant others to understand how they feel as they encounter the hospital and its surroundings.

The fear and stress of the patient needs to be understood so that this future health administrator can fully empathize and work to minimize their stress and the stress of the health professionals in the setting that have to deal with patients.

Communication skills are of utmost importance in the health care setting. By making the health administrative student observe how health professionals interact with patients will also go a long way of making that hospital/health care setting. They will be able to see what techniques of communication work and what doesn't work when dealing with a patient.

These Health Care Administration curriculums shouldn't be all business and organizational oriented. The business and organizational aspects of this curriculum should come after the health administrative student has a real appreciation of the patient experience and the health professionals that work in such a setting.

In my work days (I'm retired now) - I taught a course similar to this for pharmacy students. Before I had them step foot in a pharmacy - I wanted them to experience health care from the perspective of the patient and the health professionals that they would be having to work with when they practiced.

It was an eye-opening experience for both the students, the health professionals we placed the students with and myself. It went a long way with transitioning pharmacy education from just 'counting and pouring' to 'clinical and patient centered pharmacy'.

[Warpy]

3. Part of the problem is that they think tech can substitute for people

They see a nurse having what sounds like a normal conversation with a patient who has good numbers on his monitor. Then s/he runs from the bedside, grabs the code cart, yells down the hall to call the code in that room, cracks the cart and starts to administer forced oxygen to the patient just as the numbers start to be not good and the code team piles in. How did s/he know?

The patient might be an educated person who is speaking correctly but like he's speaking ESL. Or maybe he's a little dusky around the lips, or maybe she's suddenly talking complete ragtime. Or maybe they stop in mid sentence and say "I'm scared." Maybe the breathing pattern is a little strange. No machine is going to pick any of this up, all the numbers say the patient is doing well. The sooner a patient can be treated, the more likely s/he is to survive a crash.

So the next time you see a nurse doing chitchat with a patient, know that the wheels are turning.

[Backseat Driver]

2. Ahhh...sort of between the nurse-practitioner and the not-so pro golfer

and restauranteur philanthropist along with the risk-taking spirit of the Formula 1 driver, the strength of the body builder, the curiosity of a genetic research scientist, and the quiet determination to organize like a librarian.

Nice dream, but I'm not sure they'd understand the human condition, well or diseased, even then.