Kerala's charitable trust hospitals: The single block fallacy

Strategies for Kerala's charitable trust hospitals – Part 7

In my earlier articles I had described why most charitable trust hospitals make the huge mistake of increasing their infrastructure significantly in a brief period.

There are several reasons that drive charitable trust hospitals to make this mistake. Some of them are given below:

• The belief that the hospital is full and is turning away many patients due to a lack of consulting rooms, operation theatres, inpatient (IP) beds, etc.
• The need to compete in size with new or existing competitor hospitals
• The desire to reduce construction costs
• The belief that a good ambience can only be provided in a new building
• The belief that hospital staff efficiency will improve with a single new block rather than the existing multiple, smaller blocks

Does a new space enhance efficiency?

Let us examine the fifth reason - the belief that the efficiency of hospital staff will be improved with a single new block, rather than the existing multiple, smaller blocks.

One of the most common mistakes made by charitable trust hospitals is believing that hospital staff efficiency will be improved with a single new block.

This is mainly caused by large distances that staff have to travel between the various buildings or blocks in hospitals.

The assumption the hospital managements make is that if the entire hospital was a single block, then staff efficiency would go up i.e., the number of staff needed would reduce.

The problem with this assertion, is that the single new block is usually multi-storied i.e., consists of many floors serviced by lifts.

It is virtually impossible to get staff to manage two different floors in a multi-storey building, which means that the expected reduction in staff does not occur.

New bottlenecks

A more crucial point is that patient flow which was earlier limited to the width of the corridors in the old multiple buildings is now even further limited by the lifts in the new multi-storey single building.

As many of you who have visited multi-storey hospital buildings know, in most cases the lifts are extremely slow, there are insufficient lifts, and the lifts stop at every single floor.

This slows down patient flow dramatically, leading to increase in patient dis-satisfaction.

In other words, the lifts become the new bottleneck of the hospital with respect to patient flow – and this bottleneck is much worse than the earlier bottleneck of corridors.

Problems in evacuation

In addition, a multi-storey building is difficult to quickly evacuate in case of a fire when you have bed-ridden patients in the building.
Thus, from the point of view of fire safety a multi-storey building is much more substantial risk than several single storey buildings.

As you can see, the popular view that a new single building or block is better for a hospital compared to multiple buildings or blocks is wrong.

I urge the top management of charitable hospitals not to commit mistakes mentioned in my articles, which will cause their hospital to become uncompetitive and force them to increase their prices to survive – this will force them to deviate from their primary vision of providing affordable healthcare to patients. [End]

The author is the founder and CEO of Results Consulting Group. He is a recognized thought leader on helping entrepreneurs build and implement significant and lasting competitive edges in India and the GCC. The views expressed are personal. email: [email protected], website: www.we-deliver-results.com