NHS4010 Assessment 3 Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal

An interdisciplinary plan entails a series of activities created by a team of professionals from various fields, such as doctors, nurses, nutritionists, and informaticists. Healthcare institutions face problems that affect these professionals. These include medical errors, staff shortages, the inadequacy of resources, and poor working conditions.

Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal

These problems affect productivity issues, patient safety, and quality care delivery and can ruin an organization’s reputation hence the need for their management. Interdisciplinary teams can help discuss and develop solutions to such problems. This essay evaluates an interdisciplinary plan that can help solve the staff shortage problem, and change theory, a leadership strategy, and a collaboration strategy can support the plan’s success.

Objectives and Predictions of the Interdisciplinary Plan

The objective of the interdisciplinary plan is to reduce the consequences of staff shortages. Another objective is to balance the number of staff in the organization with the department’s needs to prevent overload in some departments and deficiency in others. An essential objective of the interdisciplinary team is to reduce the consequences of staff shortage.

According to Patel et al. (2021), staff shortage leads to an overload of the existing staff, decreased motivation and productivity, and increased nurses’ burnout and turnover. Staff shortage is inversely proportional to patient safety and care quality. The organization may be forced to employ underqualified staff to manage the shortage, compromising care quality and patient safety.

The interdisciplinary plan proposed is cross-training of healthcare professionals. Impacting new skills will enhance diversity and increase the productivity of these healthcare professionals (Patel et al., 2021). Departments will then easily balance the nurses without significant changes in care quality and patient safety. The primary goal is to improve care quality, patient safety, and organizational performance.

Change Theory and Leadership Strategy

The best change theory to apply is Kurt Lewin’s theory. The theory entails three comprehensive stages. The first stage, unfreezing, entails defining the problem, identifying causes, explaining the need for change, and mapping the change process (Tran & Gandolfi, 2019). The stage includes other aspects such as budgeting and resource allocation/planning.

The stage entails staff support to implement the change. In this case, offering to pay for staff cross-training programs or sponsoring them halfway will help produce better outcomes. The second stage, moving, will entail implementing the change (Hussain et al., 2018). People change their way of doing things, attitudes, and feelings. The stage will entail actual staff training, the assumption of new roles, and access to the accrued benefits of completing the program.

The last stage, refreezing, entails activities that will ensure the permanency of the change to ensure it becomes the new practice standard. Revising the organizational policy to include a clause legitimizing and favoring cross-training will be integral in this case.

Staff support/empowerment is the chosen leadership strategy that is highly likely to help improve the plan’s buy-in and implementation. Professional empowerment is done through increasing access to resources and information. Tran and Gandolfi (2019) note that an organization that supports its staff increases productivity and retention.

Sponsoring their education in various fields-cross training and providing post-training benefits such as an increase in salary or promotion will help manage the change. Cross-training is rigorous because professionals take up intensive training while still working. The organization should put up interventions such as giving them more free time to attend lessons and physical training and studying while working is difficult hence the need for support.

Professionals try hard to balance work, studies, and family; without adequate support, they may neglect one aspect, leading to poor family relations, decreased productivity, or poor performance (Tran & Gandolfi, 2019). Thus, staff support/empowerment is the collaborative strategy of choice in this interdisciplinary plan.

Collaborative Strategy

Shared decision-making is the collaboration intervention of choice. Without interprofessional collaboration, conflicts arise, and the organization’s daily activities are stalled, leading to poor performance. Shared decision-making is an intervention that incorporates interprofessional perspectives in making decisions (Jeanne et al., 2019). The decisions made are fair and acceptable to all involved professionals leading to better quality decisions and patient outcomes. Professionals also feel valued when involved in decision-making.

Representatives from professional teams also help increase buy-in from professionals. They will help present the interests of the professional team to the executive team hence inclusivity. Professionals will share responsibilities matching their qualifications and experience, and disruptive innovations will be easily leveraged after the professions engage in shared decision-making.

Budget and Resources Required

The hospital will begin by cross-training doctors and nurses, the healthcare professionals with the worse shortage. The cost of training a nurse or a doctor is too high, and cross-training costs are significantly lower than training and hiring a new professional. These professionals are also scarce.

The hospital will liaise with a local nursing college to provide the training because running the training in an institution will be more expensive in the long run. The hospital will train 100 of the 300 nurses and 40 of the 120 physicians yearly. The intention is to ensure optimum training and to prevent overwhelming the organization with the training needs.

The hospital will invest in lecturers from various schools to teach online classes. There will also be physical lessons for clinical teaching and skills impaction. The cost of training one nurse is estimated at $4000 and a physician $6000, an estimated total of $1.92 million for the three years. The hospital will liaise with a local university to ensure it delivers the best training accredited by institutions to the staff.

Conclusion

Cross-training staff is expensive but increases the organization’s efficiency despite the staff shortage. Cross-training also increases the professionals’ value hence a decreased need for hiring specialists, which is an expensive affair, and the specialists are scarce. The plan will also reduce medical errors, staff turnover, and burnout related to shortages and work overload. The plan will take three years to help maintain the training costs and prevent them from overburdening the organization. The plan will lead to a better organization and will thus solve the problems arising from staff shortages.

Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal References

  • Hussain, S. T., Lei, S., Akram, T., Haider, M. J., Hussain, S. H., & Ali, M. (2018). Kurt Lewin’s change model: A critical review of the role of leadership and employee involvement in organizational change. Journal of Innovation & Knowledge, 3(3), 123-127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jik.2016.07.002
  • Jeanne Wirpsa, M., Emily Johnson, R., Bieler, J., Boyken, L., Pugliese, K., Rosencrans, E., & Murphy, P. (2019). Interprofessional models for shared decision making: The role of the health care chaplain. Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy, 25(1), 20-44. https://doi.org/10.1080/08854726.2018.1501131
  • Patel, S., Hartung, B., Nagra, R., Davignon, A., Dayal, T., & Nelson, M. (2021). Expedited Cross-Training: An Approach to Help Mitigate Nurse Staffing Shortages. Journal for Nurses in Professional Development, 37(6), E20-E26. https://doi.org/10.1097/NND.0000000000000738
  • Rahman, A., Björk, P., & Ravald, A. (2020). Exploring the effects of service provider’s organizational support and empowerment on employee engagement and well-being. Cogent Business & Management, 7(1), 1767329. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311975.2020.1767329
  • Tran, T. T., & Gandolfi, F. (2020). Implementing Lewin’s change theory for institutional improvements: A Vietnamese case study. Journal of Management Research, 20(4), 199-210.

Capella Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal Example 2

Today, most healthcare organizations face several issues that have affected the achievement of desired outcomes. Staffing shortage is one of the main problems affecting health care organizations since some health care providers have retired, others have gone back to school, and many other reasons (Williams, 2017).

In this context, the proposal will focus on the labor part of the health care organization because the whole issue of staffing shortages revolves around the labor division. The anticipated outcome for this proposal is to increase patient outcomes in the health care setting.

Objective

The primary objective of this plan is to increase patient outcomes by using interprofessional collaboration. This objective is aligned to the broader health care organizational goal of attracting as many patients as possible by offering quality health care services to all patients. Once the plan is successful, the health care organization will cater to the patients’ needs to ensure that quality health care services are rendered.

Questions and Predictions

  1. How much time will be required for the interdisciplinary collaboration to become effective for the organization?
  2. I will increase the work rate for each health care provider and assess the quality of services being rendered. The health care providers will also be involved in assessing their work rate since they are key stakeholders in the health care organization.
  3. How will the health care practitioners adapt the interprofessional collaboration?
  4. First, I will enlighten them on the benefits of interprofessional collaboration. Secondly, I will encourage them to embrace interprofessional collaboration by reducing the working hours, rewarding those who embrace the approach, and offering incentives to employees. This will motivate them to embrace interdisciplinary collaboration.
  5. What are some of the strategies that can be put in place to achieve the desired outcomes using interprofessional collaboration?
  6. The first strategy is to ensure that health care providers are informed of the underway plan. This will encourage them to embrace the approach since they will have known all be desired outcomes of the plan. Another strategy is to reward those health care providers who will be the most outstanding. Rewarding will motivate other employees to give the best of their services also to be rewarded.

Change Theories and Leadership Strategies

Kotter’s change management theory will be the most appropriate theory for this proposal as it advocates for the majority of the organizational members to accept change. This theory will help the interdisciplinary team to collaborate because it will encourage all health care providers to embrace change.

The theory will act as a driving force towards the achievement of collaboration because it requires more than seventy-five percent of members to accept and embrace the change (Shadnam, 2020). The staffing shortages will be solved because all staff members will be willing to collaborate to ensure that the organization achieves all the desired outcomes.

Recognition will be deployed as the leadership strategy because employees who will be outstanding in terms of the achievement of the project plan will be recognized and rewarded. This will encourage all staff members to embrace the plan because they will be after getting the rewards (Offermann & Coats, 2018). Recognition will encourage staff members to collaborate and thus achieve the desired outcomes.

Team Collaboration Strategy

Usually, collaboration involves sharing of expertise from different disciplines (Graham & Daniel, 2021). The collaboration approach will involve sharing of knowledge by health care providers. Health care providers will collaborate in a way that they will share their different expertise, and by doing so, they will be able to learn from each other.

The collaboration approach will solve the issue of staffing shortages because roles will be shared, thus reducing the workload. The collaboration will be relevant to the team’s needs because it will help reduce workload by enhancing sharing of healthcare providers’ roles. Once caregivers learn from each other, they will be able to share roles and offer quality health care services.

Required Organizational Resources

The staffing needs of this organization are staffing shortages. This means that number of staff members is not a proposal to the workload. The required equipment is the communication resources (online messaging board) that can communicate to all staff members. The health care organization does not have the equipment.

The equipment costs approximately $ 250,000. To access the online messaging board, one requires internet-enabled gadgets such as computers which can cost approximately $100000. The overall financial budget request for the plan proposal is $500,000.

If the plan does not work as expected, the organization will likely record dismal performance because most of the resources will have been directed to the project plan. The organization will likely struggle financially because most of the resources will have been lost.

It is important to note that the plan requires a heavy investment of organizational resources. Failure of the project plan will lead to poor production and profit-making margin performance because all the resources will have been lost.

Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal References

Also Read: MHA-FPX5010 MichelleSmith Assessment 4: Strategic Plan Objectives and Balanced Scorecard