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Horizontal Thinking in Healthcare Organizations

The integration of vertical and horizontal thinking within healthcare organizations seeks to ensure the creation of value to the customers through the provision of quality healthcare services (Tolf et al., 2015). Lateral thinking has been deployed by organizations to attain clinical performance excellence through the provision of patient-centred care and highly reliable and efficient services which translate to better patient and staff satisfaction (Evans et al., 2014). Different clinical performance protocols which should be deployed to attain clinical excellence include continuous training and improvement and use of benchmarks and dashboards. This paper provides a discussion of how clinical excellence can be reached using various mechanisms.

One of the departments with the selected healthcare organization is the inpatient department. In specific, the primary role of the inpatient department in the healthcare facility is the provision of inpatient care to patients who have been deemed to have a condition requiring admission to the hospital. After a referral from the ambulatory care by physicians or through the emergency department, the patients are admitted to the inpatient department where they are observed and taken care of so that their condition can improve (Tolf et al., 2015). In the department, the nursing staff members are expected to provide care to the patients whereas the clinical officers in the facility continue to provide clinical advice to ensure a positive the progress of the patients. Additionally, it is in the inpatient department that the patients are in the close monitoring of the multidisciplinary healthcare team and hence any arising problems are addressed.

In the department, various members of the healthcare team such as the Executive Level Officer, Departmental Director, Physical and Nurses have different but interrelated roles and responsibilities. All these members have to reason horizontally by coming up with a variety of ideas via thinking in new directions. The Executive Level Officer has the overall responsibility of both leading and managing the operations of the entire healthcare facility. However, the Departmental Director focuses on ensuring the smooth operations of the inpatient department. The Physician assesses, treats, and advises the patients over a wide range of clinical conditions and provides health education to both the patients and staff members on ways of attaining optimal healthcare (Evans et al., 2014). Finally, the Nurse in the department has the central role of providing quality ensuring care through monitoring and assessment of the progress of the patients.

The clinical care guidelines, also known as the clinical practice guidelines, are those statements which have been clinically developed to assist the clinicians in making patient decisions about the most appropriate care based on specific clinical circumstances (Kredo et al., 2016). A clinical benchmark; on the other hand, is a systematic practice used where current clinical practice is compared to and even amended to attain best practice care (Burstin, Leatherman & Goldmann, 2016). Dashboards contain the critical performance indicators which should be accomplished after the provision of clinical care (Dowding et al., 2015).

One of the guidelines is that the clinicians should downgrade or upgraded based on the risk of bias, the inconsistency of findings, and directness. Clinical benchmarks and dashboards can be used to ensure that the use of specific evidence is compared to how it has been used in previous successful scenarios. Additionally, according to Kredo et al. (2016), the GMC requires clinicians to make the healthcare of the patient the first concern. Moreover, clinicians are guided to be competent and keep their professional knowledge and skills up-to-date. Using dashboards and benchmarks can help in ensuring that patients are provided with evidence-based healthcare.

The use of evidence-based practice (EBP) influences the clinical performance of the different members of the healthcare team. For instance, EBP ensures that the Executive Level Officer of the healthcare organization manages and leads the facility following how other successful healthcare organization are run (Burstin, Leatherman, & Goldmann, 2016). He/she will use some benchmark organizations and practices to inform his/her running of the facility’s operations. Similarly, the Department Director of the inpatient department will use EBP to improve on performance protocol by examining how other successful departments have been run (Dowding et al., 2016). Moreover, the physician’s assessment, treatment, and advice provided to the patient will be pegged on reliable evidence and thus improved clinical performance. Finally, nurses will base their provision of care on EBP and, therefore, conduct their monitoring and assessment of patients on previous practices which have proved effective in such an area.

In conclusion, the use of horizontal thinking has been vital in ensuring an excellent clinical performance in healthcare facilities. One of the departments from the selected healthcare facility is the inpatient department tasked with the provision of health care services to a patient admitted. The healthcare team; consisting of different members, seeks to ensure that they can add value to the patients by providing patient-centred, highly reliable, and quality driven services. Using benchmarks and dashboards can ensure that clinical guidelines for delivering evidence-based care are followed. Additionally, using evidence-based practice positively influence the clinical performance of each of the members of the healthcare team.