Five Steps for Community Hospitals to Become Great
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Becker’s Hospital Review
May 29, 2013
When it comes to the hospital sector, large tertiary facilities and academic medical centers like Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago garner a lot of the attention. In some regards, it makes sense. These institutions treat some of the sickest patients in the country, are hubs for groundbreaking research and have resources that few other healthcare organizations can match.
However, for most Americans, the community hospital is the prototypical image of a hospital. Babies being born, broken arms being mended, illnesses being treated — all of this occurs within a building that in many ways is the nucleus of each particular community.
Community hospitals may not be destination medical centers to treat the global masses, but they can still be “great” facilities. Here, three community hospital CEOs explain what these types of organizations must do to take the extra step from merely “average” or “good” to become “great.”
1. Create a sense of trust and stability. When Tim Browne was appointed CEO of Carolina Pines Regional Medical Center, a 116-bed hospital in Hartsville, S.C., in 2011, he became the hospital’s seventh CEO in a matter of less than a decade. Hospital employees, physicians and the general public were desperate for consistency within the hospital’s leadership, and Mr. Browne — who actually was born and raised in Hartsville — said he made it his top goal to make the hospital a bastion of stability for his community and gain trust back.
“I spent a lot of time outside the walls of the hospital, in addition to inside, just listening and being involved in local events and basically reconnecting with local business and industry,” Mr. Browne says. “I had been told the hospital had been absent [within the community], and we made a true grassroots effort to get back and reconnected.”
To read the other four steps of becoming a great community hospital click here.
