Salem Hospital Regional Health Services
Salem Hospital Regional Health Services is one of the largest of Oregon's 57 acute care hospitals and operates the busiest emergency department in Oregon.

It is a not-for-profit hospital, licensed for 454 acute-care beds. The hospital is the city's largest private employer, with approximately 3,500 full- and part-time employees. There are 465 physicians on the active medical staff, representing 46 different specialties, who admit patients to the hospital. More than 275 volunteers provide non-medical support for the hospital.

The Family Birth Center, which opened in 2003, is a state-of-the-art program that offers family-health education to expectant and new parents, neo-natal intensive-care services, and also provides space to a number of community support services that benefit new families.

Challenge
Build confidence to face a demanding strategic agenda by:

• Improving organization’s confidence in its own change capabilities.
• Rejuvenating the management team and regain strong market position
• Assessing the demands of planned strategic change initiatives against the organization’s capacity and brings the two into better alignment.

Solution

• Develop a methodic process for aligning capabilities and confidence with strategic plans
• Reverse a culture of low confidence and enthuse it with a realistic, yet optimistic view of its capacity for change
• Uncover weaknesses in the culture and structures around management that could impact needed collaboration levels and focus of top executives.
• Improve incentives for cross-departmental collaboration on strategic initiatives
• Focus management as a whole on monitoring fewer initiatives that more clearly required their ongoing attention, while distributing greater responsibility for other initiatives
• Assess resource demands across strategic initiative portfolio

Results

• Used Fulcrum Methods Organizational Change Management Methodology to develop confidence and tools for charging ahead with a demanding strategic agenda, resulting in raised awareness in the executive team that certain aspects of organizational culture and practices needed change. Furthermore the process generated agreement that the portfolio of strategic initiatives could be accomplished by the organization.
• Deeper into the process using OCM management grew more confident in the organization’s capabilities for strategic change , which led to increased leadership capacity and greater cross-unit collaboration on strategic initiatives which had been identified as a prerequisite for their success.
• Output from the OCM process presented leadership with documented evidence that conflicts for resources across projects could be resolved, driving agreement that a set of projects with detailed timelines was attainable.
• The project portfolio tools introduced through the project became available to aid the leadership in managing strategic change going forward.