Identification of the key factors for successful hospital management in slovakia

Abstract

BACKGROUND: We can find many types of hospitals, such as state-owned, private, and also specialized institutions, such as those that focus on addictology. If managers want to manage hospitals successfully, they need to know the factors that most affect other processes, and they need to know the factors that are most affected so that they can use them to measure the success of their management. AIM: The aim of this paper is to identify the factors involved in the success of hospital management in Slovakia. METHODS: After a literature review, we selected 11 of the main success factors of hospital management, including: patient satisfaction, measured by the number of justified legal complaints; errors and incidents; percentage of readmissions; nosocomial infections in a hospital; mortality; employee satisfaction with working conditions; use of modern equipment; waiting time; length of stay; average cost per bed and day for medicines and materials, and ratio of capital expenditure to total cost. To identify the main factors, we asked experts on hospital management in Slovakia to use the DEMATEL technique to evaluate results. RESULTS: After the evaluation of the research we find that the three most important factors are the percentage of readmissions, average cost per bed and day for medicines and materials, and nosocomial infections in a hospital. CONCLUSION: The results of our research suggest that managers should focus most on reducing the percentage of readmissions in order to increase the quality of healthcare delivery.