Google the words best Practices, and you will discover about 75 million net pages addressing the subject. Google hospital best practices and the list shrink to a mere 9 million web pages. This two-word phrase so fast became a universally-recognized portion of the management language is hard evidence that consultants have been in the office. It is all about timing and a Couple other things… Insert the buzz word-like popularity of best practices into the staying power of a much abused expression There is no use in re-inventing the wheel, stir from the culture’s insatiable appetite for immediate results, and shake well. You now have the potential makings of real trouble.
Best practices have Been defined as documented approaches, activities and approaches demonstrated through research and analysis to be effective in attaining the highest levels of excellence in productivity, profitability and competitiveness. Part of this concept’s appeal is its elegant simplicity. Find the ideal way to do something and copy it. Problem solved. Ah, if only it had been that easy.
Famed management guru Peter Drucker explained the modern best neurology hospital in bangalore as the most complicated social organization ever made by man. That complexity is a truth. For that matter, so is the department head’s frequent claim of uniqueness. Every hospital differs from all others in literally thousands of ways. These differences exist among peers that share the same fundamental mission and challenges. Here’s a short list of hospital-to-hospital differences that can be found in countless combinations and permutations of combinations, each with enormous implications for productivity, profitability and competitiveness:
- Systems and Work Process Factors
- Patient access.
- Nursing care delivery.
- Medication administration.
- Order entry.
- Results reporting.
- Care documentation.
- Patient discharge.
The greatest shortcoming of this best practices concept in the long term is that it serves to stifle management imagination. Imitation by definition cannot produce progress. It would be more precise and instructive to re-label the best practices concept to something such as best practices which we know about–so far. More importantly, the sheer variety of performance-defining factors makes it impossible to identify with certainty those strategies, actions and approaches that may or must be emulated. The likelihood that visits to best practices hospitals will determine an exportable trigger of high performance that will work on your hospital is vanishingly small.