The hospital
Memorial Hospital Case Study, week 2 assignment
Memorial Hospital is a privately owned 600-bed facility. The hospital provides a broad
range of health care services, including complete laboratory and X-ray facilities, an emergency
room, an intensive care unit, a cardiac care unit, and a psychiatric ward. Most of
these services are provided by several other hospitals in the metropolitan area. Memorial
has purposely avoided getting involved in any specialized fields of medicine or obtaining
very specialized diagnostic equipment because it was felt that such services would not be
cost-effective. The General Hospital, located only a few miles from Memorial, is affiliated
with the local School of Medicine and offers up-to-date services in those specialized areas.
Instead of trying to compete with General Hospital to provide special services, Memorial
Hospital has concentrated on offering high-quality general health care at an affordable
price. Compared with the much larger General Hospital, Memorial stresses close personal
attention to each patient from a nursing staff that cares about its work. In fact, the hospital
has begun to place ads in newspapers and on television, stressing its patient-oriented care.
However, the hospital’s administrator, Janice Fry, is concerned about whether the hospital
can really deliver on its promises, and worries that failure to provide the level of health
care patients expect could drive patients away. Janice met recently with the hospital’s
managerial personnel to discuss her concerns. The meeting raised some questions about
how the hospital’s quality of health care could be assured. Jessica Tu, director of nursing,
raised the question, “How do we measure the quality of health care? Do we give patients
a questionnaire when they leave, asking if they were happy here? That does not seem to
answer the question because we could make a patient happy, but give them lousy health
care.” Several other questions were asked concerning the hospital’s efforts to keep costs
down. Some people were concerned that an emphasis on costs would be detrimental to
quality. They argued that when a person’s life is at stake, costs should not be of concern.
After the meeting, Janice began thinking about these questions. She remembered reading
recently that some companies were using total quality management (TQM) to improve
their quality. She liked the idea—if it could be used in a hospital.
1. Discuss some ways that a hospital might measure quality.
2. What are the potential costs of quality for Memorial Hospital? How could the
value of a human life be included?
3. Are there any ideas or techniques from TQM that Janice could use to help Memorial
focus on providing quality health care?
4. What measures could Memorial use to assess the quality of health care it is
providing?
