ASSIGNMENT HELP | Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor.

Competing needs arise within any organization as employees seek to meet their targets and leaders seek to meet company goals. As a leader, successful management of these goals requires establishing priorities and allocating resources accordingly.

Within a healthcare setting, the needs of the workforce, resources, and patients are often in conflict. Mandatory overtime, implementation of staffing ratios, use of unlicensed assisting personnel, and employer reductions of education benefits are examples of practices that might lead to conflicting needs in practice.

Leaders can contribute to both the problem and the solution through policies, action, and inaction. In this Assignment, you will further develop the white paper you began work on in Module 1 by addressing competing needs within your organization.

To Prepare:

Review the national healthcare issue/stressor you examined in your Assignment for Module 1, and review the analysis of the healthcare issue/stressor you selected.
Identify and review two evidence-based scholarly resources that focus on proposed policies/practices to apply to your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
Reflect on the feedback you received from your colleagues on your Discussion post regarding competing needs.
The Assignment (4-5 pages):

Developing Organizational Policies and Practices

Add a section to the paper you submitted in Module 1. The new section should address the following:

Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
Describe a relevant policy or practice in your organization that may influence your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
Critique the policy for ethical considerations, and explain the policy’s strengths and challenges in promoting ethics.
Recommend one or more policy or practice changes designed to balance the competing needs of resources, workers, and patients, while addressing any ethical shortcomings of the existing policies. Be specific and provide examples.
Cite evidence that informs the healthcare issue/stressor and/or the policies, and provide two scholarly resources in support of your policy or practice recommendations.

MODEL ANSWER

Healthcare organizations, whether public or private, have an ethical mandate to provide patients with quality care. Public organizations do so with government support albeit through tax collected from the public. However, private organizations have to mobilize resource and charge clients for the healthcare services rendered. Such organizations operate as business entities and hence must effectively balance their resources to implement policies that will eventually improve the quality of care delivered to patients (Brownie et al., 2019). The policies need to be carefully handled to ensure the organization remains afloat. Consequently, competing interests may emerge as the organization tries to balance between making profit and treating staff fairly, pay competitive salaries and other opportunities like professional development. The purpose of this paper is to explore such competing interests and the subsequent policies in the healthcare organization in regards to upskilling opportunities as the relevant healthcare stressor.

The Competing Needs That May Impact the Selected Healthcare Issue/ Stressor

As stated in the introductory paragraph, the identified stressor is upskilling through opportunities for further training. One of the competing needs that impacts this stressor is the continued advocacy for the state-of-the art healthcare services that often result in better healthcare outcomes. Since patients are the main stakeholders within the organization, they are justified to demand for quality care which they also believe meets value for their money. For instance, patients are more interested in the best technology, adoption of evidence-based approaches in care as well as being handled by the most skilled staff in the organization (Huang et al., 2020). Consequently, healthcare professionals will need to upgrade their skills through further training in order to meet the standards and expectations set by the patients. However, the patients may not care much of the resources to be invested in training the healthcare professionals. To them, being attended to by the most qualified and skilled personnel is what matters most.

The other competing need which will likely impact the need for upskilling is the cost factor which the organization must consider. Being a private entity, the organization seeks to make optimal profits from its business undertakings. Investing in staff through training programs is an example of an expense that the organization has to clearly find value for. The critical question to ask is “is the training of staff a venture that is worth undertaking?” Will the staff come back and help the organization get more clients due to their reputation and acquired expertise? The training opportunities must also be weighed against the risks of the organization having staff that is not competent and updated with the emerging healthcare challenges.

A Relevant Policy in My Organization that will Influence Upskilling Opportunities The organization has made remarkable efforts geared towards improving the competency level of staff. In the organization’s blue print and five-year strategic plan, the organization has established a policy provision that ensures that employees have undertaken advanced training. This has been made possible by allocating scholarship positions as well as reimbursement programs especially for employees that have served in the organization for a l0ong time now. The challenge has however been that the educational opportunities have been subject to the fund’s availability and the organization’s budgetary allocation for each fiscal year. There is another condition which is that the employees must have been with the organization for a minimum of five years and must also…