Health Care Manager Interview

Health Care Leadership Interview Questionnaire

Student’s Name

Institutional Affiliation

Health Care Leadership Interview Questionnaire

For this particular interview, I choose to question a supervisor that is in charge of customer service representatives of those that deliver therapeutic equipment at Dosher Memorial Hospital. Dosher’s mission is to be the “Friendliest, most patient-focused” hospital in North Carolina. To achieve this mission, the hospital has adopted evidence-based leadership strategies that have promoted excellent service delivery to its patients and provided a favorable working environment for its employees. In the department that I interviewed, their goal is to provide adequate therapeutic equipment to patients who need them. Some of the processes carried out within the department include processing patient’s medical insurance, receiving new orders, delivering medical equipment, and processing payments accordingly.

Livingstone Rica is the supervisor in charge of customer representatives. The duty of a customer representative is to direct calls to the right department if they are not in a position to complete those calls. They also respond to phone calls from medical doctors or directly from patients and they offer help based on their needs. Moreover, customer representatives also assist in taking care of a few tasks such as making arrangements for patients to meet breathing therapist to be able to be set up with CPAP, helping the health records unit with filing and providing medical equipment that is out of stock. Examples of such equipment include hospital beds, walkers, and CPAP supplies.

Livingstone’s role as a supervisor is to oversee the responsibilities of the customer representatives and ensure that every task is carried out accordingly. He ensures that customer representatives in charge of responding to calls do it effectively and complete each request that either the patient or a doctor is requesting. Livingstone as well offers guidance to the representatives in case they encounter difficulty while completing a particular call or uncertain on how to deal with a situation. He gives feedback to the representatives on areas that they are doing well and those that need improvement. Livingstone together with the other supervisors that are in charge of the various departments in the organization usually has meetings with the director daily. The purpose of the meeting is to evaluate if the goals are being accomplished and Livingstone gets updates as well as any changes to be implemented that affects the manner in which representatives carry out their duties. Any changes to be made are then communicated to the appropriate department with the relevant training recommended. Livingstone is assigned this job by the director of the organization and he has a duty to delegate them accordingly.

Since Livingstone supervises customer representative department, he has a duty of not only ensuring that representatives are expertly taking calls and responding to requests accordingly, but he also has a role of ensuring that any disagreements that exist between employees are handled carefully. In a case in which a representative does not complete a process in the right procedure or if representatives were having disputes between each other, he is required to find a lasting solution to the problem at hand. If he is not in a position to handle the matter or make an appropriate decision, then he will forward the issue to his superiors for help.

During my interview with Livingstone, he mentioned a few situations that occurred that required him to make an ethical decision. For the last five years, he has been working at Dosher Memorial Hospital; he has managed to resolve most of the ethical issues concerning his department. Livingstone informed me that oxygen orders in hospital lasted for a year and once they were out of stock, the patient’s doctor was required to make a submission regarding renewal to ensure that his patient continues with medication. In regard to this, all representatives are trained on how to identify an oxygen order that has expired or when patients make a request for resupply. It is therefore unethical to provide oxygen supplies with an expiring order to a patient

Livingstone happened to have come across some patients in the facility getting oxygen resupply that already had expiring orders for a prolonged period of time. Such kind of scenario was against the organization’s policies and code of ethics. He, therefore, did not want to make any assumptions such as a representative doing it intentionally but rather find out by himself. After making inquiries from a representative, he learned that he was not aware that the oxygen orders were expired while administering them to the patients. It was also hard for him to deal with patients who were a bit unruly. Livingstone restated to him the significance of following the right procedure when handling oxygen orders resupply as well the tips on how to deal with uncooperative patients. Livingstone understood the situation in which the representative was in but he emphasized on the need to follow the right procedures to avoid the organization violating any rules. He went ahead to serve the employee with an official letter of warning as an indication to let him be extra cautious next time or otherwise his name would be forwarded to the director for further steps to be taken.

Besides being a supervisor in charge of his department, Livingstone has adequate resources at his disposal that he can efficiently utilize when finding solutions to ethical issues. His immediate resource is the organization’s director. Despite the fact that the director has been in the organization for over a short period of time, about 5 months, he is quite knowledgeable on how to deal with situations that need to respond to immediately. In cases where the matter does not need the attention of a director, Livingstone depends on his fellow supervisors in the other different departments to offer him help when a need arises. This is because they all experience similar kind of ethical issues in their various departments and therefore they can be in a position to offer assistance.

This interview with Livingstone was educational and it provided a lot of insight on how to deal with certain situations in the place of work. The position of a supervisor gives one an opportunity to show how they can handle different ethical issues at their disposal. This interview has provided a lot of guidance that I can apply in the future in regards to becoming a health care manager in the future. It has provided relevant guidance such as utilizing the resources around to handle difficult situations. Learning through experience is the best ways to grow as well as build one’s career.