Identifying and Cultivating Alliances

Competency Assessment Title: Collaborative Assignment Reflection
Assignment Directions
Collaborative Assignment Reflection
Part 1: Hospital Merger and Culture Considerations
Imagine that your hospital has recently merged with a group of medical centers. As a high-level executive, you have been asked to develop a strategy to integrate the two cultures. Success with this effort must also translate into the optimization of patient care, quality, safety, cost of services, and access to care.
Research best practices and devise approaches to address potential issues and pushback. Create a proposal of 700 to 875 words that includes the following:
• Identify and describe the personnel groups affected by the merger.
• Predict and explain challenges in merging the two cultures. Consider the cultures of the clinical staff and the medical staff.
• Propose strategies or solutions to address those challenges.
• Explain the negotiation strategies that may be useful to elicit buy-in on the decisions.
• Design the modes of communication you will use to convey these strategies to the clinical and medical staff.
o Identify who should be the primary communicator.
o Outline the information that should be included.
o Explain how buy-in will occur.

Part 2: Reflection
Facilitation and negotiation are skills you will use on a regular basis as a leader in health care. You researched best practices and applied them to a merger of two workforce cultures.
Reflect on the research you completed as well as your proposal you wrote in Part 1. Write 350 words on the following:

• Examine the overall strategy and implementation you devised to address the different aspects of the company merger. What were the major factors and considerations that led you to make the strategic decisions for the merger?
• Discuss the health sector best practices you drew from your research to help determine the decision-making and negotiation approaches defined in your proposal.
• Describe any facilitation and negotiation strategies that you have used or experienced in any setting that you can use in your professional life.
Cite 3 reputable references to support your assignment (e.g., trade or industry publications, government or agency websites, scholarly works, or other sources of similar quality).
Combine your proposal and the reflection.
Format your citations according to APA guidelines.