Instituting the New Training Programs

Instituting the New Training Programs

Introduction:

Boston is the capital and largest city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. Early in its history, Boston made its name as a center for health care service. The medical schools of both Tufts University and Harvard University are located in Boston, as is Massachusetts General Hospital, the major teaching hospital for both schools. A similar large Boston-based teaching hospital was uncertain about the effectiveness of its management’s expertise. This hospital has three levels of management consisting 125 managers & 8 top executives. But surprisingly there was no formal training and development process for the managements. The only formal in-service technical education for nurses were took place.

Top administrations recognized the need of training for giving better service in-line with overall goal of the hospital. To meet the requirement vice-president of human resources was came up the idea of initiating formal training for all three levels of managements, which was debated by some of the top administration as they didn’t saw tangible results of the proposal. After detail cost benefit analysis top executives agreed to hire an outside consulting firm to give management training to all the managers.

At the initial stage of implementing the change (training and developments programs for managers) was not appreciated by all. But as managers are getting results immediately after the learning they started encouraging & demanding more themselves. The committed top managements reinforced positive results through different internal communications. With the high demand of training programs from managers, top executives approved an individual training & development department headed by training director. Subsequently a self-supporting training center was introduced outside the hospital premises.

After effective expansion of the training department cost justification was questioned of having two training department – one for nursing and one for management training. After extensive study it was decided to merge the nursing training wing with training department. It was a drastic change and took extensive time to convince the key people in the nursing division about the advantages of the merger. Finally the merger happened for the best interest of the hospital & greater good.

Objective & Learning of the Case:

Change is good when it is managed effectively. The development of hospital-wide education departments was a drastic change. And this is a case of managing and implementing the changes effectively. Key success factors of the instituting the new training programs were –

Commitment of Top Managements: Recognizing the need for training and development and doing it are two different things. In this case top managements were committed and assertive to all the positive changes for the interest of the hospital.