Combining Christian Values With Your Health Care Career
Christian values have long played an instrumental role in health care. In fact, during the Middle Ages, monasteries were known for operating hospital institutions. Christ’s message of love and compassion aligns perfectly with the health care field. Your Christian faith influences all aspects of your life, so it only makes sense that your Christian values would influence your career in health care administration.
Leadership and Communication Skills
Health care administrators fill leadership roles. The team you lead will look to you to model ethical standards. Use the values of your Christian faith, such as your patience, forgiveness and acceptance of others, to influence your interactions with your team. Effective leaders are those who can work toward conflict resolution, practice servanthood and make difficult decisions guided by the wisdom of God’s word.
Onsite Patient Resources
The patient support services a hospital offers is dependent on that hospital’s budget. As a health care administrator, you may be working directly with the organization’s finances. You can make budgetary decisions that are not only fiscally prudent, but also best for the patients. Additionally, patient education is an important component of the resources that should be made available to all who enter the hospital. Keeping the patient at the center allows us to keep God at the center.
Faith is a significant presence in the lives of many patients, but not all of them have access to faith-based resources while they are hospitalized. You could consider starting one if your hospital doesn’t already have one. On top of that, you could also advocate for the addition of a prayer chapel and faith based services or even counseling groups that can assist patients and families through difficult times, especially those associated with death and dying.
Patient Advocacy
Thinking beyond spiritual resources, consider ways of making a positive difference in the day-to-day lives of patients and their families. Every hospital should have a team of patient advocates, sometimes called patient navigators or care coordinators. If you work for a hospital that doesn’t have this program, you can wield your influence to establish it. Through a patient advocacy program, patients and their families can sort through confusing medical terminology, understand their health care decisions better and make use of patient support tools.
Ethical Policy Changes
Health care administrators work in many different public and private organizations. Instead of working in a hospital, you might decide to work for a private insurance company, pharmaceutical company, home health agency, medical sales, human resources within health care, governmental policy development, nursing home administration or state or county health department. Agencies such as Medicaid, Medicare and the Veterans Health Administration also need health care administrators.
In all of these settings, including in private hospitals, one of the key responsibilities of health care administrators is to effect change in policies. You’ll have the opportunity to shape policy according to your compassionate values, such as by lobbying efforts for future trends and changes to ensure health care for all.
As you manage the operations of your organization, you can look for ways of improving the delivery of care in order to give each patient the best possible outcome and to allow all patients to receive the care they need with dignity and respect.
Your education at Grand Canyon University combines modern knowledge and technical skills with Christ’s wisdom. If a career in health care management is your calling in life, click on the Request More Information button at the top of our website. You can apply today for admission to our Bachelor of Science in Health Care Administration degree program, offered by the College of Nursing and Health Care Professions.