Analyzing the Intensive Care Unit Department using the Systems Theory

Analysing the Intensive Care Unit Department using the Systems Theory
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Analyzing the Intensive Care Unit Department using the Systems Theory
Organizations are an open social system whose existence and survival fully depends on their interaction with the environment and setups they are in. Organizations, such as Health Care depends on its ecosystem for essential resources which facilitates its operations. These include its employees, who provide the professional skills, patients who purchase the healthcare product and services, its suppliers who avail materials and medical supplies, key investors responsible for funding and the government, whose core function is regulation. Inside an organization, departments or units are interdependent. Systems theory can be used to clearly and concisely understand health care structures, processes and outcomes processes and their interactions within a health care system. Systems theory is used as a guiding principle to try explaining the components of a health facility and the relationship between them, separating factors between the systems, goals of each and the systems flexibility to change and adapt in response to outside forces (Bales, 2017).
Systems theory helps us know how a facility operates and gives an understanding of its structure, operation process and feedback shortfalls that constitute to the existence of the entire facility. It provides us with the capability to run organizations and achieve its goals in the process effectively. A system can, therefore, be defined as a conglomeration of independent elements, which are not related in any way but work seamlessly to achieve a specific goal or target. Any system has a major duty of converting materials, resources, energy, and information into a service or product for use (Williams, 2017). A health facility has some departments which include the emergency department, psychiatric, coronary care unit, pediatric, intensive care, hospital pharmacy, and endoscopy unit among many others. Each one of these departments is dependent on the other and all work towards a major role of achieving a health facility’s goals. In this paper, our main focus is on the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit, on how its existence is dependent on other departments in a health facility and how it also symbiotically benefits on the same departments. This is one of the most important departments in a hospital; The pediatric population will continue to increase at a steady rate whereby there will be approximately 9 million more children by 2050 (Child Stats.gov, 2015). Also, about 20% (14.6 million) of children and youth have a special health care need CYSHCN) accounting for 80% of expenditures for pediatric health care (HRSA, 2016).
To show how the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit relates to other sections of the hospital and how they symbiotically depend on one another, we will evaluate this dependency using an open systems approach. The open systems approach points out the facility's behavior by drawing out repeated instances of output, throughput and negative feedback between the department and other sections of the hospital. As a health facility, Pediatric Intensive Care Unit will receive input from other departments in the ...