INSTRUCTIONS

As the CEO of an acute-care hospital in a metropolitan setting, you could sense it was the start of a perfect storm. Your clinical services director asked to meet with you to discuss the hospital’s operating room services and your executive assistant just scheduled an appointment for you to meet with the chief of surgery. Given the coincidences, you wonder if you should meet with them together, but you decide to not have a joint meeting.

Your meeting with the clinical services director was scheduled first. In this meeting, you were apprised of the increasing number of out-patient surgeries being scheduled. This would normally be welcomed news, except both out-patients and in-patients use the same operating room facilities and the case schedule was becoming stressful for the surgeons and nurses. Nurses were increasingly being pressured to quickly turn over the surgical suite for the next case and the clinical services director was concerned this could lead to potential mistakes in the operating room. Quality scores for operating services were slowly declining with patients citing the length of time they were required to stay in the hospital for an out-patient procedure.

The meeting with the chief of surgery had a similar tone; however, the surgeon offered a potential solution: to move the out-patient surgeries from the hospital operating room to a separate ambulatory surgical center located either on the campus of the hospital or within the same geographical area. This was a particularly significant suggestion given the magnitude of such a project. Getting the hospital board to approve such a venture would be challenging as well. However, new models of hospital reimbursement and value-based care guidelines show promise for this type of service and will strengthen your presentation to the hospital board of trustees. Coincidentally, at a recent professional conference, you attended with your colleagues, there was a presentation on this trend followed by lengthy discussion of the benefits of moving hospital out-patient departments to ambulatory surgical centers.

You must make a case for this operational change to your board members. Earlier work with your leadership team provided their concurrence and support to make this presentation to the board. To show their support, your leadership team is in the audience at your presentation to the board represented by the clinical services director, chief Nursing officer, chief finance officer, chief strategic initiatives officer, and the chief supply chair director. The chief of surgery was called out of the board meeting due to an emergency, so you will have to proceed without them.

There are five members on the hospital board who represent various sectors of the community including the president of a local philanthropic organization, a banker, a lawyer, the local police chief, and a representative from the community social services organization. The local television station and newspaper have sent reporters to the board meeting, which is a normal occurrence.

After conducting your research on this potential new project in the form of a SWOT analysis, you will prepare a 12-15 slide presentation which you will present at your hospital board meeting. The slides will have notes consisting of 100-150 words and you will provide a voice-over narration of your PowerPoint presentation. Your time on the board agenda is limited to 15 minutes and they appreciate succinctness. Be sure to include your SWOT details in one of your slides. A sample graphic from Word is shown here.

Figure 4. SWOT Analysis

Harmon, A. (2015). SWOT analysis. Salem Press Encyclopedia.

Length: The slide presentation will consist of 12-15 slides, not including the first slide as your title slide and the last slide as your reference slide.