Hospitals are among the main components of the health system in any country. Due to their nature and differences from other service sectors, hospital management has very particular characteristics.
The Hospital Manager is responsible for running an organization that ensures individualized and humanized patient care and, at the same time, is economically viable. And without forgetting the ethical and legal aspects.
For that reason, there is a concern with training professionals who have a profile suited to the challenges posed. It is worth noting that this concern is not exclusive to Brazil. We can cite, for example, an article published by researchers led by Farideh Moradi in 2020, which presents results obtained in a study carried out in Iran.
According to that article, the competencies and skills required of a hospital manager include: strategic skills, perceptual skills, human relations skills, specific experience in the sector, and personal characteristics such as motivation and interest, management knowledge, and self-confidence and courage in decision-making.
Strategic skills
Among strategic skills, we can highlight the importance of the hospital manager’s ability to analyze the external environment and project different future scenarios. This is called strategic thinking or a strategic mindset.
Knowing how to analyze the health context of the community in which the hospital operates and infer future changes gives the manager the conditions to be proactive, efficient in meeting demands and able to plan the hospital’s long-term evolution.
Having a systemic mindset is also essential in hospital management. It is necessary to define diagnostic tools focused on the problems that arise during the management process and that allow them to be solved in a systemic way. The hospital is a complex system that involves different people, different expectations and various interfering factors (both external and internal).
Perceptual skills
As for perceptual skills, the ability to make decisions in unstable situations is essential. Just look at the health crisis the whole world has been living through since 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Epidemics, outbreaks, changes in the epidemiological profile of populations, adjustments in health legislation… all of this has always existed.
But with COVID-19, everything happened very fast. A new disease, with a new virus and an incredible capacity to spread! Such a situation demanded quick responses from the hospital manager.
Besides the ability to make decisions in adverse situations, the ability to devise solutions considering the profile and suitability of each employee for certain roles is part of an effective management process.
Human relations skills
Creating a collaborative and productive environment depends on the hospital manager’s competence in understanding employees’ motivations, identifying each person’s strengths and weaknesses, delegating roles and coordinating the team in a harmonious and coordinated way.
Human relations skills and the ability to interact with others are among the most important and basic skills of managers. In fact, they are the key to the hospital manager’s success. It has already been duly demonstrated that there is a significant relationship between managers’ relationship skills and employee motivation.
Personal characteristics
To be a hospital manager, certain specific personal characteristics are needed. Some managers already have personal characteristics suited to working in health services, such as being motivated and having self-esteem and confidence to make decisions.
But it is possible to consistently and effectively develop new skills and competencies through continuous improvement. For example: having information about the health field and, particularly, about hospitals, having diverse work experience in the field, having management knowledge and having communication and conflict-management skills.
To that end, it is important for organizations to provide training so that managers develop their skills, enhancing innate characteristics and minimizing personal weaknesses and possible gaps in the training process.
You can deepen this reflection by watching the following video, which shows the challenges of the Hospital Manager:
In the search for professionals who are already motivated and have specific training in Hospital Management, including strategic skills, human relations skills and personal characteristics that favor performance in the field, hospitals in the East Zone of the city of São Paulo establish partnerships for internships and professional experiences for students of the FAPUGA Hospital Management program, as well as for the development of training and capacity-building for their employees.
