Project management in healthcare involves several skills and techniques that improve the efficiency of operations in medical facilities. The two important concepts that were learned in the course are the process of creating a project timeline and the utility of an outline for creating a review/plan/paper and proposal. Both of those concepts are critical to the discipline of health science and will be applied in my future career as a health educator/director.
The process of creating a project timeline is a part of the planning stage of the project. Overall, project management identifies four stages of a project’s lifecycle (Bove & Houston, 2020). They include initiation, planning, execution, and conclusion. Health science as a profession implies constant work on various projects; hence, the success of each project highly relies on its precise planning (Glegg, Ryce, & Brownlee, 2019). Creating a timeline of the project helps health directors, their subordinates, and participants to visualize every task of the project, the deadlines of these tasks, and the responsibilities that each team member has within it. A study by Ledesma et al. (2019) shows that projects that used timelines and visualizations were executed in lesser time than projects without visualization. Therefore, this concept is vital to master as it increases the efficiency of work and saves time, which is the most valuable resource in healthcare.
Health science is also based on writing reports, publications, and scientific papers. Therefore, another vital concept learned in this course is the utility of an outline for creating a review/plan/paper and proposal. As a health director who is responsible for the work of other researchers, one should ensure that the work on the paper or proposal is organized (Sarachman, 2021). Each researcher should provide an outline of his work for the approval of the topic and the way it is elaborated in the paper.
References
Bove, L. A., & Houston, S. M. (2020). Project Management Skills for Healthcare: Methods and Techniques for Diverse Skillsets. Productivity Press.
Glegg, S. M., Ryce, A., & Brownlee, K. (2019). A visual management tool for program planning, project management and evaluation in paediatric health care. Evaluation and program planning, 72, 16-23.
Ledesma, A., Bidargaddi, N., Strobel, J., Schrader, G., Nieminen, H., Korhonen, I., & Ermes, M. (2019). Health timeline: an insight-based study of a timeline visualization of clinical data. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision making, 19(1), 1-14.
Sarachman, M. (2021). Project Management in Healthcare. In Healthcare Informatics: Strategies for the Digital Era (pp. 59-73). 6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300, Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742: CRC Press.