Indian eye care hospital challenge trains senior executives

Citation

Ferrar, J. (2009), "Indian eye care hospital challenge trains senior executives", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 8 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/shr.2009.37208fab.006

Indian eye care hospital challenge trains senior executives

Article Type: HR at work From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 8, Issue 6

Short case studies that demonstrate best practice in HR

Jonathan Ferrar Director of HR, IBM UK & Ireland.

Linking training and team building programs with voluntary work in developing countries is growing in popularity. IBM has teamed up with a young company called Adopt a Business to offer a structured program aimed at challenging and developing IBM’s top talent.

Adopt a Business takes highly competent people outside of their normal working environment and challenges them to use their skills in a very different and demanding way. It is how that process is managed across home and host countries, and the learning curriculum that is wrapped around the experience, which enables Adopt a Business to deliver the more specific long-term benefits that participants, client companies and the host organizations are looking for.

This approach benefits the three parties involved: the partner organization, such as Aravind Eye Care System (AECS) that is driving social value in the developing world; the sponsoring company, in this case IBM; and participating executives who undertake assignments with the partner as part of their development.

A learning opportunity

Adopt a Business was formed in 2002 by an international team of MBA students at IESE Business School, Barcelona and has an inspiring social objective – to make a real difference to people’s lives by helping to increase the opportunities for people to help themselves. It achieves this by providing partner organizations that support these objectives in the developing world with highly skilled people to help them to develop and grow. This learning opportunity for the participating executives to enhance and develop their cultural understanding and build expertise about emerging markets assists IBM in its ability to function as a globally integrated enterprise.

Matthew Farmer, Managing Director for Adopt a Business, sees the scheme as building self awareness and self confidence in participants to take on new challenges and thrive in them. Such assignments offer opportunities for talented individuals to challenge themselves in an unfamiliar environment and, in turn, help the host organizations to develop, thrive and prosper.

The need for practical advice

AECS is based in Madurai, India and is the largest and most productive eye care facility in the world, in terms of surgical volume and the number of patients treated. It uses a funding model that provides free eye care to the poorest of the poor who make up some 70 percent of their 284,000 eye surgeries per year, as well as 70 percent of the 2.4 million outpatient attendances.

AECS’ goal is to perform a million surgeries annually through 25 eye hospitals by the year 2015. In addition to owning five of its own hospitals in the south of India, AECS has started a “managed hospital” program where, together with a partner, AECS takes the responsibility for establishing and running other eye hospitals elsewhere in India. It is currently working with four such hospitals in the north of India and this has brought huge challenges in terms of resourcing and management of the sites. AECS required practical advice to develop a more structured framework to enable this growth. The organization requested Adopt a Business to support its vision and, as a result, IBM provided executives to assist AECS in developing a structure and road map for future growth. Over the past year, three IBM executives have worked with AECS on four-week assignments.

Building a road map

Michael Johnson, HR and communications manager for IBM UK’s Maintenance and Technical Support Division, kicked off the project. On arrival at AECS, Johnson sought to understand the culture of AECS by traveling to the managed hospitals to identify and evaluate the cultural differences between them. He was able to make suggestions for a road map for a managed care initiative and brought clarity to this mission by developing an organizational structure.

This initiative was named Aravind Managed Eye Care Services (AMECS). Johnson identified three major focus areas for AMECS – structuring partner relationships, with the relationships between AECS owned and managed hospitals; developing capacity so that four hospitals are established a year; and developing the ability to manage and run 40 hospitals successfully.

Within 24 hours AECS had agreed to the suggested ideas and new focus was given to the initiative, aimed at achieving long-term growth and sustainability within a framework that would enable the eye operation targets to be met. The initiative resulted in the hospital group being awarded a $300,000 grant to open another five hospitals and Johnson continues to be involved in the activities and decision making after his assignment has finished.

Developing a goal setting process

Building on this road map for managed care, Paul Murray, technical consultant for IBM UK’s Software Business joined AECS. Learning that there was no consistency in tracking the amount of eye surgeries being carried out across the hospitals, Murray worked on a goal setting process. His role was to develop a framework to track the number of eye surgeries being carried out and his collaborative approach helped create local ownership of the process. At the same time Murray also helped provide AECS with the skills to replicate management structures across its hospitals.

The tracking framework included areas such as the types of surgeries, ID projects and the roles of the administrators across the hospitals. AECS plans to introduce the framework to every hospital this year. This will enable the hospitals to be moderated equally, as well as empower the hospital staff to own the business goals.

Putting in place a quality insurance process

Providing the Aravind Eye Hospital in Pondicherry with a quality assurance process to document, monitor and set benchmarks for its patient care was the challenge for Kerry Cawse, IT delivery operations manager, IBM UK. The hospital annually performs 32,000 surgeries and examines 350,000 outpatients and has good mechanisms in place for monitoring surgical procedures.

The hospital looked to Cawse to document a quality assurance manual and put in place a process to monitor and compare clinical procedural variances not only at a hospital level, but also individually within each of the nine departments. The hospital team had already conducted research into the standards and practices deployed around the world. Cawse’s mission was to take the best practices from these global organizations and put a framework in place to deliver a quality assurance manual specific to AECS.

A rewarding and constructive experience

If you have highly skilled people, and you are going to send them across the world, it makes good sense, and is highly rewarding for all parties, to use their talent and expertise constructively to make a real impact in the developing world.

IBM manages a number of global initiatives to develop its top talent, such as the IBM Corporate Services Corps program, a volunteering scheme that gives high-potential employees the chance to help local businesses in emerging markets. In the UK, the Adopt a Business program continues to form part of the IBM talent management agenda providing a flexible assignment model for executives. Michael Johnson, Paul Murray and Kerry Cawse found their experiences challenging and rewarding. All were able to bring back new thinking and skills that provide smarter ways of working both in and out of the workplace.

Dr Aravind, administrator at AECS, agrees that the projects have enabled AECS to develop a management structure with clear objectives and role clarity that will assist the organization with its aspiration to give sight to a million people a year by 2015.

About the author

Jonathan Ferrar has been with IBM for over eight years, and has been in the HR profession for over 15 years. After leaving Cambridge University in 1989 with a degree in Natural Sciences, Ferrar joined Lloyds Bank in the UK as a trainee bank manager. After three years, he entered the HR profession as a training manager, still in Lloyds Bank. In 1995, he joined Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) and carried out a number of roles in outsourcing and consulting, lastly as the UK head of recruitment. Ferrar joined IBM in 2000 and has had senior HR roles in recruitment, outsourcing and as an HR business partner. Jonathan Ferrar can be contacted at: jferrar@uk.ibm.com