HCS 305 Week 1 Health Administration Program Outcomes and Professional Goals Example

From the Back of the Ambulance to the Operations Office: Connecting a Health Administration Program's Outcomes to One Student's Career Goal

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

HCS/305: Health Care Professional Development

Week 1 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The student, his employer and his goals are composites written for a model paper; competency models and research come from the sources listed.

For seven years I have worked as an emergency medical technician for a composite regional ambulance service that runs 22 ambulances across three counties. One night last winter, three of our crews waited more than an hour at the same emergency department to hand over patients while calls stacked up across the county. Nobody on the scene could fix it; the problem lived in scheduling, contracts with hospitals and data no one was reading. That night I decided to move from the ambulance into the operations office. This paper connects my health administration program's outcomes to that goal.

My Goal

Within four years, I want to be an operations supervisor at a regional ambulance service, responsible for scheduling, fleet deployment, hospital relationships and performance data. Longer term, I would like to become director of operations.

What an Operations Supervisor Does

Before choosing coursework priorities, I shadowed our operations supervisor for two shifts. She built the next week's schedule around two sick calls, met a hospital's emergency department manager about offload delays, reviewed a complaint about a late response, approved overtime and presented monthly response times to the county. Almost none of her day involved patient care, and almost all of it involved people, money, rules and data.

Why the Timing Is Right

Our service plans to add a second operations supervisor within three years as call volume grows. The county's contract, renewed next year, adds new reporting requirements on response times and offload delays. Both changes create openings for someone who understands the field and can manage data.

Reading the Program as a Map

The program's outcomes fall into five areas: managing people and organizations; health care finance; law, ethics and regulation; information systems and data; and quality and performance improvement. Each connects to tasks an operations supervisor performs.

Management

Operations supervisors schedule 90 field employees, handle conflicts between crews and mediate complaints from hospitals. Coursework in organizational behavior, leadership and human resources prepares for these tasks.

Finance

Ambulance services depend on reimbursement from Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers, and a supervisor must understand how staffing decisions affect cost per transport. Finance and economics courses prepare for budgeting and reading financial reports.

Law, Ethics and Regulation

Supervisors deal with patient privacy, state licensing rules, labor law and ethical questions about which calls to prioritize when units are short. Law and ethics courses prepare for these.

Information and Data

Response times, unit hour utilization and hospital offload times are all data problems. The night that changed my mind was, at bottom, a data problem that no one had turned into a decision. Information systems and statistics courses prepare me to use our dispatch data.

Quality and Performance

Quality courses teach improvement methods I can apply to offload delays and response times.

Comparing With National Competency Models

Stefl (2008) described the Healthcare Leadership Alliance model, which identified competency domains shared across major health care management associations, namely professionalism, business skills and knowledge, leadership, communication and relationships, and understanding of the health care environment. Calhoun et al. (2008) described a separate model from the National Center for Healthcare Leadership organized into transformation, execution and people domains. Both models overlap substantially with the program's five areas, which gives me confidence the program targets what employers expect.

What Field Work Already Built

Seven years on an ambulance built skills that appear in these models. I make decisions under pressure, communicate with frightened patients and families, work in two-person teams for 12-hour shifts and know the local health care system from the inside: which hospitals divert, which nursing homes call for routine transfers at 5 p.m. and which roads flood. The models call this knowledge of the health care environment; for me it is simply the job I have done every night for seven years.

What I Still Need

Business skills are my largest gap. I have never built a budget, read a financial statement or negotiated a contract. Leadership is the second gap: I have trained new EMTs but never supervised a team or managed a performance problem.

Where the Two Meet

The overlap between what I know and what I need is my advantage. A supervisor who understands both the street and the spreadsheet can explain a schedule change to crews in words they respect.

Priorities for the First Year

First, finance: I will take my finance course early and ask our operations manager to show me the budget. Second, data: I will learn to use our dispatch reports to answer one question each month. Third, leadership: I will volunteer to lead our station's new-hire orientation.

Measuring Progress

Research on goal setting found that specific, challenging goals generally lead to better performance than vague intentions to do one's best (Locke & Latham, 2002), so each priority carries a concrete target. At the end of the first year, I want to be able to explain our cost per transport, produce a monthly offload delay report and point to a group I have led.

Risks to the Plan

Shift work makes regular study hard, and mandatory overtime during busy months could crowd out coursework. I will plan school around the published schedule four weeks ahead and trade shifts early rather than late when a deadline approaches.

Support I Will Need

My operations manager has agreed to meet with me monthly. My family understands that school will take evenings on days off. A classmate from my EMT course, now a dispatch supervisor, has offered to review my first data reports.

Conclusion

The health administration program is not a set of hurdles between me and a promotion; it is a map from the ambulance to the operations office. Its outcomes match the tasks I want to perform and the competencies national models describe. My field experience gives me a head start in knowing the environment, and the program will build the business and leadership skills I lack.

References

Calhoun, J. G., Dollett, L., Sinioris, M. E., Wainio, J. A., Butler, P. W., Griffith, J. R., & Warden, G. L. (2008). Development of an interprofessional competency model for healthcare leadership. Journal of Healthcare Management, 53(6), 375-389. https://doi.org/10.1097/00115514-200811000-00006

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705-717. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705

Stefl, M. E. (2008). Common competencies for all healthcare managers: The Healthcare Leadership Alliance model. Journal of Healthcare Management, 53(6), 360-373. https://doi.org/10.1097/00115514-200811000-00004