| Course | D908 Healthcare Management |
|---|---|
| Task | Task 1 |
| Paper type | Strategic plan evaluation |
| Length | About 1,100 words, 4 pages |
| Format | APA 7 |
| School | Western Governors University (WGU) |
| Program | Master of Healthcare Administration |
| Updated | September 2026 |
Free sample paper for D908 Task 1
A Mission About Community Health and Goals About Volume: Evaluating a Composite Community Hospital's Three-Year Strategic Plan and the Leadership Needed to Fix It
Student Name
Leavitt School of Health, Western Governors University
D908: Healthcare Management, Task 1
Course Instructor
Month Day, Year
A Mission About Community Health and Goals About Volume: Evaluating a Composite Community Hospital's Three-Year Strategic Plan and the Leadership Needed to Fix It
The Hospital and Its Plan
Harbor Point Medical Center is a composite 190-bed nonprofit community hospital with an operating margin of 0.4% last year. Its board approved a three-year strategic plan, titled Growth 2029, after a planning process led by an outside consultant and the executive team. The plan has five goals: grow surgical volume by 12%, open an ambulatory surgery center in a joint venture with an orthopedic group, raise the operating margin to 3%, expand the cardiology service line and reach the top 10% nationally in patient experience. This paper evaluates each component of the plan, identifies where it is misaligned, recommends collaborative approaches to strengthen it and evaluates the leadership strategies needed to carry it out.
Evaluation of the Plan's Components
Mission, vision and values. Harbor Point's mission is "to improve the health of every community we serve." Its vision, adopted with the plan, is "to be the region's first choice for specialty care." The vision is clear and motivating, but it narrows the mission from community health to specialty market share. A vision should describe the future the mission is working toward; this one describes a different destination.
Environmental analysis. The consultant's analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats is thorough on competitors, payer mix and physician supply, and correctly identifies the orthopedic group's interest in outpatient surgery as an opportunity. Its major weakness is what it leaves out. As a charitable hospital, Harbor Point must study its community's health needs at least once in each three-year period and adopt a written plan for responding to what that study finds (Internal Revenue Service, n.d.). The hospital's most recent assessment named access to behavioral health care and diabetes as the county's top priorities. Neither appears anywhere in the environmental analysis.
Goals. The five goals are financially realistic; a hospital with a margin under 1% must strengthen its finances to survive. But four of the five are about volume or margin, and none addresses the community health priorities the hospital has already committed to address. Only the patient experience goal speaks directly to the people the mission names.
Objectives. Good objectives are specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-related (Doran, 1981). Some of Growth 2029's objectives meet that standard, such as increasing outpatient orthopedic cases from 2,100 to 2,900 a year by 2028. Others do not: "strengthen physician relationships" and "become known for clinical excellence" have no measure, target or date, so the board will have no way to tell in 2029 whether either happened.
Action plans. Action plans exist for three goals. The ambulatory surgery center joint venture, the plan's largest and riskiest initiative, has no named owner, budget or timeline, and the medical staff outside orthopedics learned of it from the board announcement.
Monitoring. The plan will be reviewed once a year at the board retreat. Annual review is too infrequent for a plan whose financial goals depend on quarterly volume, and there is no dashboard linking objectives to measures.
Where the Plan Is Misaligned
The central problem is alignment. The mission promises community health, the vision promises specialty leadership and the goals pursue volume and margin. Staff reading the plan cannot tell how their work serves the mission, and the community cannot see its needs reflected. The misalignment also creates risk: the hospital's own implementation strategy for its community health needs assessment has no place in the plan that directs its resources for the next three years.
Collaborative Approaches to Strengthen Alignment
Harbor Point does not need to abandon its financial goals; it needs to show how they serve the mission and to add what is missing. Three collaborative approaches would help. First, hold a planning retreat that includes medical staff leaders from several specialties, two community board members and the leaders of the county health department's behavioral health and diabetes coalitions, with the explicit task of connecting each goal to the mission. Second, add a sixth goal for community health, with measurable objectives such as reducing the average wait for an outpatient behavioral health appointment from 34 to 14 days and enrolling 400 adults in a diabetes self-management program by 2028. Third, revise the vision with staff and physician input so that it describes a healthier community supported by strong specialty services, rather than market share alone.
Physician involvement deserves particular attention. A concept analysis defined physician engagement as regular participation of physicians in deciding how their work is done, making suggestions for improvement, setting goals, planning and monitoring performance, and linked it to outcomes including efficiency, innovation and patient satisfaction (Perreira et al., 2019). Growth 2029 involved physicians in none of these steps except as the audience for its announcement.
Leadership Strategies for Implementation
Three leadership strategies fit the plan's specific challenges. The first is change leadership built on urgency and a guiding coalition. Kotter (2012) argued that major change fails when leaders underestimate the need for urgency and try to drive change without a powerful coalition. Harbor Point's leaders should share the financial facts openly, since a margin under 1% is itself a case for change, and form a coalition that includes physicians, nurses and community voices rather than only executives.
The second is dyad leadership for each service line, pairing a physician leader with an administrator who share accountability for the goal. This gives the ambulatory surgery center and cardiology initiatives the owners they currently lack and gives physicians real authority over the work.
The third is transparent accountability. A quarterly dashboard reviewed by the board and shared with staff would show each objective, its target and its status, and each goal would have one executive owner who reports on it. Transparency turns the plan from a document into a management tool.
Conclusion
Growth 2029 is financially sensible but strategically incomplete. It pursues volume and margin without explaining how they serve the hospital's mission, omits the community health priorities the hospital is obliged to address, contains objectives that cannot be measured and leaves its riskiest initiative without an owner. Collaborative planning with physicians and the community, a community health goal, measurable objectives, dyad leadership and a quarterly dashboard would give Harbor Point a plan its staff, physicians and community could recognize as their own.
References
Doran, G. T. (1981). There's a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management's goals and objectives. Management Review, 70(11), 35-36.
Internal Revenue Service. (n.d.). Community health needs assessment for charitable hospital organizations: Section 501(r)(3). Retrieved September 29, 2026, from https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/community-health-needs-assessment-for-charitable-hospital-organizations-section-501r3
Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading change. Harvard Business Review Press.
Perreira, T. A., Perrier, L., Prokopy, M., Neves-Mera, L., & Persaud, D. D. (2019). Physician engagement: A concept analysis. Journal of Healthcare Leadership, 11, 101-113. https://doi.org/10.2147/JHL.S214765
What the D908 Task 1 instructions ask
The first D908 task asks you to evaluate an organization's strategic plan and recommend how leaders can improve and implement it. You will usually assess each component of the plan, identify misalignment, propose collaborative approaches and describe leadership strategies. The plan may be supplied by the course or one you know. Graders look for each component judged against a stated standard, misalignment explained with examples, collaborative approaches that involve the people affected and leadership strategies tied to specific weaknesses. An evaluation that praises or criticizes the plan in general terms, without standards, will fall short of the evaluation aspects. Keep the organization's financial position in view, since a plan must be affordable as well as coherent.
How this D908 Task 1 example is built
The evaluation opens with the hospital's size, finances and the plan's name and period. Each component is judged in turn: the mission and vision for clarity and fit, the values for whether behavior reflects them, and the goals and objectives against a measurability test. A separate section explains the misalignment in plain terms, showing how staff reading the documents would receive mixed messages. Three collaborative approaches follow, each naming who takes part and what it produces. The leadership section matches three strategies to three weaknesses found earlier. The conclusion states that the plan is financially sensible but incomplete. Sources include research on strategic planning in hospitals, change leadership and federal requirements for nonprofit hospitals.
Where the D908 Task 1 rubric puts the marks
D908 Task 1 aspects are scored competent, approaching competence or not evident. A components aspect checks that mission, vision, values, goals and objectives are each evaluated. A standards aspect rewards judgments tied to criteria. An alignment aspect looks for misalignment explained with examples. A collaboration aspect asks for approaches that involve stakeholders. A leadership aspect wants strategies suited to the plan's challenges. Graders notice when recommendations follow from weaknesses found in the evaluation, rather than from a general list of leadership styles, and they expect management research to be cited for the strategies proposed. Evaluations that judge each component by the same set of criteria read as fair.
D908 Task 1 help: what sends it back
Plan evaluations come back most often when components are described rather than judged. For each, state the standard and whether the plan meets it. Second, alignment is asserted without examples. Show where a goal contradicts the mission. Third, collaborative approaches are vague, such as engage stakeholders. Name the group, the method and the product. Fourth, leadership strategies are generic. Tie each to a weakness you found. Finally, keep recommendations realistic for the organization's size and margin, since graders expect plans that could actually be carried out. Describe how progress on the revised plan would be tracked, such as a quarterly dashboard reported to the board. Show that leaders would communicate changes to staff, since a plan that no one understands is rarely carried out. Close with a clear judgment of the plan as a whole.
Get a D908 Task 1 example written to your instructions
Send the task instructions and rubric aspects from your D908 course of study. We write a custom strategic plan evaluation to those exact aspects, returned in 24-48h. The first custom sample is free.
Other Healthcare admin sample papers
- D776 Task 1 Sociopolitical Drivers Analysis
- D911 Task 1 Health IT Strategy Evaluation
- D907 Task 1 Research Synthesis Brief
- D916 Task 3 Capstone Presentation
D908 Task 1 questions, answered
Is the D908 hospital's plan real?
No. Harbor Point Medical Center and its plan are hypothetical. The standards applied, including requirements for nonprofit hospitals and tests for measurable objectives, are real and cited.
Should D908 test objectives for measurability?
Yes. A recognized test, such as checking that objectives are specific, measurable and time-bound, gives the evaluation a standard. The sample applies one to each objective in the plan.
What collaborative approaches suit D908 Task 1?
Approaches that bring affected groups into the plan, such as community advisory input, physician and staff planning sessions and joint goal setting with partners. Each should produce a specific change.
What leadership strategies does the D908 sample use?
Change leadership built on urgency and a guiding coalition, followed by two further strategies matched to weaknesses in buy-in and accountability. Each strategy answers a problem found in the evaluation.
Where can I find a free D908 Task 1 sample paper?
Scroll up for the complete evaluation of the Harbor Point plan and the notes beside it. Send the plan your D908 course gave you, and a first custom evaluation is on us.