Generational conflicts in hospitals !!!

We are sure you could belong to one of these three categories

  1. First-gen entrepreneur who’s family is yet to/not join the hospital
  2. First-gen entrepreneur who’s planning to hand over to next-gen or just handed over
  3. 2nd gen who’s taken over completely

If you belong to the first/third category, let’s not worry for now. Let’s primarily touch upon the second category(both the gen’s perspectives).

As a first-gen, you would have to build a practice over time, and with the loyalty of your patients build a hospital with difficulty, and have managed to successfully run over the years. Many a time, one of the spouses would have been the main doctor and the other taking care of the administration. Considering you have spent all your life building the hospital, it’s quite normal to expect the next-gen to take over and continue the legacy and stay comfortable

for who’s comfort is a different question? 

And here comes your son/daughter who’s about to complete their graduation and take over and you are dreaming for the day when you have successfully handed over.

What happens next? Your son/daughter, who might have most commonly done his/her education in a private medical college brings back all that he/she had experienced in terms of operational quality, hospitality to patients, marketing, etc back to your nursing home to it in par with the standards they had experienced. OMG ! the concept of marketing might be a cuss word for you; you know these systems may not be right for your set of patients; you believe the hospitals are a place of healthcare and not luxury. Yes! you are right.

What could be the alternate perspective? Your kiddo, as you believe to be so, having seen a different world(these days the world changes every 3 yrs) might want the hospital to match the current world’s needs in terms of infrastructure, process, manpower, and so on. The first aspect is most easily done as we always believe in investing in equipment as an asset but not investment in processes or manpower. Can you imagine painting a broken down car and expecting better performance. Likewise, improvements in infrastructure when not combined with well-trained manpower coupled with operational efficiencies may not provide the desired result.

In fact, the major reason for conflicts which should be seriously addressed is the grouping of staff who are closer to each one of you making their conflict as yours !!! What’s important in the transition is each other’s understanding (the son/daughter needs to learn from the parent’s experience and the parents the modern concepts and expectations of the son/daughter). There have been multiple examples of this going wrong and the son/daughter ending up traveling to the UK/US or sometimes even working for bigger corporate hospitals within the city.

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