Prepare for a Whooping Cough Outbreak

Competencies

• Apply major organizational perspectives and theories to real problems facing health services organizations.
• Identify concepts in organizational decisions, strategic alliances, and managing efficiency and effectiveness.
• Analyze decisions that impact the healthcare delivery system.
• Analyze leadership challenges in healthcare.
• Analyze operational decisions of healthcare organizations and the impact on business performance outcomes.
• Apply principles of organizational learning, innovation, and change in healthcare organizations.

Introduction

Public health problems are diverse and can include infectious diseases, chronic diseases, emergencies, injuries, environmental health problems, as well as other health threats. The following project will allow you to demonstrate your ability and skill in applying major organizational healthcare theories, innovation, and change concepts that impact leaders and the decisions they make when facing operational challenges in the healthcare industry.

Scenario

Acting as the president of a local hospital in an economical and socially deprived county in the US, you have just received a phone call from the state's CDC office advising the hospital of an outbreak of Whooping Cough. As of now, a majority of the state is being affected by the outbreak and resources are becoming scarce. Your hospital is the only medical center that serves the county. Based on trends and tracking, the CDC believes that your county in which can expect a major increase in patients in the next 48-72 hours with the disease. As the president of the 300-bed hospital which serves a diverse population of 50,000 citizens, it is the president's responsibility to create a plan of action to help address and treat patients of the county who might become ill in the next 48-72 hours.

The first task you will undertake is to research the disease, its course of treatments, and cures to help effectively treat the potential outbreak. Once you have done so, you will create a presentation that you can give to the county board and CDC showing how your hospital will combat the disease, treat patients, and develop strategies to prevent the spread of the outbreak.

As the president, you will need to work with internal and external vendors on ensuring that the hospital has enough resources and that more resources can be ordered and delivered as quickly as possible. You will need to reach out to and gain assistance from other healthcare organizations in the area to help you track, treat, and control the spread of the disease.  As the leader of the hospital, you will have to make decisions on how to properly manage the shortage of beds, doctors and nurses, and resources that may occur due to the outbreak.

Instructions

Create an executive summary addressing how best to successfully manage the problem outlined in the scenario. This plan has two parts. First is the executive summary followed by a PowerPoint presentation with audio.

Step 1 - Write an Executive Summary covering the following:

• Develop an action plan to share with the hospital staff and CDC local office to address and contain the outbreak in an effective and efficient manner at the hospital.
• Outline the process of developing alliances and partnerships to help treat and contain the outbreak through the use of efficient and effective approaches to the healthcare delivery systems.
• Analyze the organizational decisions needed to be undertaken as a leader; that would play a part in addressing and containing the outbreak along with the use of limited resources.
• Determine the best leadership style to use to effectively bring together multiple departments and agencies to work together as one team in containing and treating the outbreak.
• Summarize innovative processes needed to address the outbreak given the shortage of resources and time to implement a strategy.
• Outline any ethical considerations that should be addressed as part of the strategy in treating and containing the outbreak due to the shortage of resources such as money, manpower, and medicine.
• Write a conclusion on the process changes needed to help improve reaction time and containment from the standpoint of the hospital.

Step 2 - Create a PowerPoint presentation with audio

As president of the hospital, you will need to create and record a 5-minute presentation using PowerPoint made up of at least 12 slides covering your findings and suggestions in dealing with the outbreak and containment of the disease. The presentation will be presented to local health officials including the officials from the counties identified by the CDC. Therefore the style of the presentation needs to be formal. You may use applications such as Screen cast-O-Matic (research for tutorial videos if needed) to record your presentation.