Seattle Children’s Hospital (2011, n.d.) was the first pediatric specialty care hospital founded west of the Mississippi River. Seattle Children’s Hospital, supported by the philanthropic efforts of the community, performs at the cutting-edge of pediatric medicine and research. With nearly 60 pediatric specialties and award-winning research faculty, Seattle Children’s Hospital presents expertise in the field of pediatric medicine.
Services
Seattle Children’s Hospital (n.d.) is a pediatric specialty care center associated with the University of Washington to provide medical and surgical residents with the hands-on practical experience and education needed to succeed in the medical profession.
The hospital (Seattle Children’s Hospital, n.d.) has many specialized programs, or sub-specialties, within its pediatric specialty, including urgent and emergency care, oncology and hematology, craniofacial, orthopedic and sports medicine, a heart and transplant center, neonatology, neurosurgery, and general and thoracic surgery.
Seattle Children’s Hospital (n.d.) also boasts an award-winning research facility dedicated to treating and eliminating pediatric disease.
Strategic Planning
The strategic plan of Seattle Children’s Hospital (2011) focuses on the hospital’s vision and four specific goals:
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provide the safest, most effective care possible,
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control and reduce the cost of providing care,
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find cures and educate clinicians and researchers, and
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grow responsibly and provide access to every child who needs us (p. 2).
In order to succeed in reaching these goals, the hospital’s plan must have directives that outline the strategies and tactics useful in attaining the goals.
Strategy
Strategy is the broad means directed towards attaining strategic goals. As Seattle Children’s Hospital’s (2011) strategic plan demonstrates, in order to achieve the means of providing the safest, most effective care possible, “[the hospital] will standardize our care processes and strengthen our systems to prevent and respond rapidly to medical errors” (p. 5). This strategy is broadly stated, provides direction, and acknowledges that failures may still occur, which allows for the provision of a secondary, or backup, strategy for response to these failures.
Tactics
Tactics are the individual steps made within a strategy towards attaining a specific goal. Tactics should be moral, safe, efficient and effective towards the strategic goals. For instance, the strategy of “[standardizing] our care processes and [strengthening] our systems to prevent and respond rapidly to medical errors” (Seattle Children’s Hospital, 2011, p. 5) is well-stated, yet broad. In order to employ this strategy, tactics must be employed that are specific to meeting the described goal. In this case, Seattle Children’s Hospital (2011) has identified that “[completing] the transition to an electronic medical record system” (p. 5) is a specific means that can be used to help fulfill this particular strategy and meet the described goal.
Another tactic not presented in Seattle Children’s Hospital’s (2011) strategic plan but helpful in attaining the goal of improved patient safety and drawn from the strategy of “[standardizing] … care processes and [strengthening] … systems” (p. 5) would be the formation of an anonymous, voluntary self-reporting system in which a nurse or physician submits a card detailing a medical or surgical error in the spirit of identifying processes and systems in need of improvement.
Discussion
Strategic plans are guided by strategic goals, and strategic goals can have many strategies that are employed and useful in meeting the stated goals. It is also true that a plethora of tactics can be employed for each strategy.
Strategic plans are often based on lofty, yet attainable, goals. In order to meet these goals, one must only ask a simple question: How? With each broad answer, a continuous and recursive series of How? can be used to work the strategy into a number of manageable tactics to use to reach that lofty goal.
References
Seattle Children’s Hospital. (2011). Shaping the future of pediatric healthcare: Strategic plan 2012 to 2016. Retrieved from http://www.seattlechildrens.org/pdf/strategic-plan-2012-2016.pdf
Seattle Children’s Hospital. (n.d.). About Seattle Children’s. Retrieved from http://www.seattlechildrens.org/about/
