St.Gallen's Cantonal hospital is Switzerland's 6th largest and the largest non-university hospital. It employs around 4'000 people and serves as Eastern Switzerland's central point for primary health care.

Initial situation:

Medical doctors and nurses are trained to care for patients but as hospitals are becoming ever more complex organizations, they have to deal with a large variety of administrative and managerial tasks in addition. Although medical doctors, nurses and administrative staff have to collaborate across professions, they have their own line of reporting and specific culture within their profession. This makes management an even more challenging task.

Challenges:

Management in modern hospitals has to deal with a multitude of questions such as:

• Which measures do we have to undertake so that our hospital can maintain a good place within the national health care system and will be in a sustainable way?

• How can we build a patient-centric process organization while safeguarding and improving the quality of treatment?

• How can we improve the quality of collaboration and leadership across departmental and professional silos?

In order to address these questions in a very specific way for the Kantonsspital St.Gallen, an approach that focused on organizational development was chosen.


Participants:

Integration of Medical Doctors, Nurses and Hospital Administration with managerial responsibility.

Concept:

The course runs over one year, and consists of 8 different modules. Parallel to the course, all participants have to work on a Management Project (MP), which is reflected on and discussed in each module.

The participants earn credits points which can be claimed against MBA programs or other executive education programs upon approval of the intaking program.