Essay Example on Kindred Hospital: Extended Medical Care & Specialty Services in North Dallas

Kindred Hospital prides itself in extended medical care and provides more than the traditional healthcare associated with major hospitals. It is a 48-bed traditional healthcare facility situated off of Greenville close to the I-635 and I-75 intersection North Dallas. The facility offers various healthcare services that include organ transplant, stroke, and brain injury care, wound care, IV antibiotic therapy and Palliative care among other major services. The hospital facility is owned by Humana, a private entity. The current CEO, Mr. Benjamin A. Breier took over the helm of the facility in 2015 and has maintained quality service delivery over the years. Mr. Breier is credited for major transformations of the facility to include the introduction of outpatient care, palliative care, and expanded cancer treatment facility in addition to establishing a robust management style. He blends a people and task-oriented leadership style, a feat that has enabled him to steer the hospital facility to great heights and increased its reputation beyond Texas.

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Besides engaging directly with the subordinate staffs, Mr. Breier takes great pride in encouraging feedback and offers extensive direction and guidance to the employees. He is often known to take a back seat and let the employees exercise freedom in raising ideas and opinions on how best to drive the healthcare service delivery to greater heights. His leadership style is a blend between democratic and delegative but leans more on the democratic style. However, he often holds the final answer and decision making in major challenging conditions. While his leadership style is situational at times, he tries to involve himself directly with his employees, attending to the patients and holding a collaborative impromptu meeting to iron out minor issues. Even though at times he takes long in engaging and having a day to day management of the organization, he lets the employees operate and manage the hospital in accordance with the laid down legislation.

According to Ozbag (2016) the five-factor personality model analyzes an individual based on their openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness. Others are neuroticism and agreeableness (Ozbag 2016). Analyzing Mr. Breier using the five-factor personality model reveals an individual open to new ideologies, new experiences, beliefs and agreeable to unconventional concepts. At the same time, he is goal oriented and is often motivated towards achieving set objectives. The success and growth of the medical facility are attributed to his desire to have the facility uphold high professional and ethical values. Out of the facilities ten major projects that have been mentored under his watch, only one showed signs of failure. All the other projects succeeded well beyond the imagination of the staff members.

Out of the office work, Mr. Breier is not social and he has very few friends. He is known to head direct home after office work and rarely receives personal calls from friends. Although he does not loath friendship and social networking, he is just not focused on an in-depth relationship outside his professional work or homely engagements. However, to those who know him, Mr. Breier is a very likable character and is often willing to help and go beyond in helping. He often has a unique way of solving problems, a feat that has often encouraged other staff members in consulting him even on personal issues. He has a positive mindset towards challenges and responds calmly to difficult situations.

In 2016, barely nine months after taking over the management of the hospital facility, Mr. Breier faced one of the biggest challenges of his career. The workers were up in arms calling upon the management to revise their salaries and remuneration scheme. The employees who included doctors, nurses, palliative care professionals, and non-medical staff all joined in a go slow to pressure the management to revise their pay and enact an agreement they had made with the previous management. The agreement was aimed at improving their working conditions, ironing out thorny issues such as leave and promotions. For about 1 week, the healthcare facility experienced one of the most non-patient oriented care ever recorded in the hospital facility. The patient's started complaining about several opting for treatment in other healthcare facilities. In a bid to avert the situation and restore normalcy in the day to day healthcare delivery Mr. Breier, engaged the worker's representatives and listened to their plight.

Over a period of five days, during which the workers exerted pressure on management, Mr. Breier drew a contingency plan that would see a committee come up with a favorable remuneration plan and scheme as previously outlined by the last management. While the consultations and engagements were ongoing, Mr. Breier found time to communicate and share with the employees directly to get their opinions and suggestions on how best to avert the situation. Over the wrangling period, the facility lost over $100 million in revenue.

Conclusion

Despite the loss, Mr. Breier learned the importance of engaging employees on their welfare and well-being. He learned to have direct communication with them on all issues concerning their work, personal lives, and engagement with the hospital. After bringing back the hospital day to day activities back to normal, Mr. Breier drew a memorandum of understanding with the employees on how to handle disputes and solve employee-management wrangles.

Reference

Ozbag, G. K. (2016). The role of personality in leadership: five factor personality traits and ethical leadership. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 235, 235-242.