Critical Care Hospital, Essay Example

Critical Path Method, also known as CPM, is a set of several techniques used to plan projects. For Critical Care Hospital to push forward the implementation of their new CATSCAN, they will need to determine what activities need to be completed, the order of these activities, their normal timeframe, their normal cost, their crash time, and their crash cost. It is essential to determine whether speeding up the implementation of the CATSCAN will actually result in noticeable profit.

The project manager must first consider the activities that need to be completed, which includes the manpower it will take to install the equipment, a decision as to where the CATSCAN should be installed and whether space needs to be made for it, the hiring or reallocation of staff to operate the equipment once it’s functional, and organizing patient appointments. Once this is complete, the project manager must consider how long it usually takes to complete these activities; as stated in reading, it would usually take about a year to complete all of these steps. However, the project manager needs to list these steps individually and determine the individual time commitment for each; doing so will allow the hospital to find ways to decrease the overall time of the CATSCAN implementation.

Next, the project manager must consider the crash time and crash costs for each of the aforementioned activities. Completing the project more quickly will cost more money for several reasons, the most obvious of which is overtime pay for staff or the cost of hiring additional staff members for the installation and operation of the machine. In addition, it will cost extra money to renovate a hospital room that is currently being reused for another purpose and convert it to a CATSCAN room. Lastly, hospital equipment that assists with computerized appointment scheduling needs to be brought to the CATSCAN room; according to responsible resource allocation CPM, this should be taken from an area of the hospital where it isn’t needed.