Dis-Organized

As professor Cyborg indicated in her post hospitals are highly bureaucratic systems, in which various components often work at odds with each other. When I was a department manager at a healthcare facility in Los Angeles, I reported to my division chief in another city. The division would periodically send out staff members to my facility to assess the effectiveness of department operations, and make recommendations to improve organizational efficiency and customer service. Recommendations often included hiring additional staff members, or the purchase of new equipment. Increases in the department budget, or capital expenditures, needed the approval of the facility CFO, who responded to each request with a resounding NO! Although the division recommendations would have made a positive impact on the department, I soon learned that making requests was a pointless exercise, since the reporting structure of the organization was a formidable roadblock to change.