Planning for the future of your health care facility

As the average age of health care facility managers increases, many health care organizations are bracing for a wave of retirements over the next decade. Some health care organizations make succession planning a priority, but in other cases, facility managers can face challenges when trying to ensure the future viability and success of their organizations.

Which positions should be included as part of a department’s succession plan? What skills and abilities will a facility manager need five or 10 years from now? Should you involve your staff in succession planning? Which staff members are ready to take on new challenges? How can you develop team members to expand their skill sets? What external sources can be cultivated to help with future staffing needs?

To help health care facility managers tackle these challenges, ASHE has developed a new monograph that explains the steps to succession planning. “Succession Planning: Preparing for the Future of Your Facility and Your Career” is available as a free PDF download to ASHE members.

Proper succession planning continually identifies the right people for current and future positions.

This process can help employees to reach their career goals and remain motivated, and can help organizations to maintain institutional knowledge and continuity.

Succession planning should be more than the creation of a document to dust off when someone retires. 

The ASHE monograph shows facility managers how to:

• Identify the key positions that require a thorough succession-planning strategy.
• Define the competencies required for the identified positions through accurate position summaries.
• Assess current employee competencies for key positions.
• Identify and develop internal resources to fill employee gaps in education and experience.
• Cultivate external resources and relationships to fill key facility positions.
• Plan for personal career growth.

The monograph also includes helpful tools, including a sample succession-planning worksheet, a sample job competencies matrix, sample position descriptions and more.

Visit www.ashe.org/monographs to access the document and other important resources for ASHE members who are struggling with important management issues.

Deanna Martin is the membership and communications director at the American Society for Healthcare Engineering.

ASHE INSIGHTS

Important monographs available from ASHE

Following are two recently released monographs that can be accessed by ASHE members as free PDFs at the resource library.

• "Roadmap to Resiliency." This monograph summarizes lessons learned from previous disasters, explains how to assess vulnerabilities and suggests new ways to safeguard emergency power through new technologies, innovative protocols and information sharing.
• "Life Safety Code Comparison." Many factors influence whether a health care organization chooses to apply the most recent edition of NFPA 101, Life Safety Code, to a project. This monograph provides an exhaustive list of the differences among the 2012 edition of NFPA 101 and the 2000 and 2009 editions, as well as the 2015 edition of the International Building Code.

Design guidelines available to industry through ASHE

The 2014 editions of the Facility Guidelines Institute’s Guidelines for Design and Construction of Hospitals and Outpatient Facilities and the Guidelines for Design and Construction of Residential Health, Care, and Support Facilities can be purchased at www.ASHEstore.com.