Entrepreneurship Reflection Assignment, Essay Example

Overview

Entrepreneurship in the health care industries is a rapidly growing extension of traditional venues. Based on recent findings as well as my own experience with it, I believe that entrepreneurship will offer further opportunities to workers in health care as the field continues to evolve. Specifically, entrepreneurship opens doors never before available to those in the nursing profession, allowing them to both create new careers for themselves and cater to a growing need within the public.

Origins of Health Care Entrepreneurship

The trends in health care entrepreneurship owe their beginnings to unfavorable conditions, some of which also confront the entrepreneur. In a potent chain of events, larger numbers of seniors requiring health care in the 1960’s and 1970’s brought about unprecedented hospital costs, which led to fierce competition for government funding, specifically from Medicare. As doctors and nurses struggled to obtain necessary funds, these same professionals developed an awareness that privatizing their services could bypass a great deal of this bureaucracy, while drawing funding to their own, entrepreneurial enterprises. “Physicians started to unbundle what had once been in the domain of the hospital” (Drake, 1994, p.99), and seized the means to create their own health care services.

So too did this potential expanding of the field vastly affect the nursing profession. Traditionally the “in between” element in the public mind in regard to medical care, nurses began to perceive that this breaking up of the industry was an opportunity to empower themselves. A great portion of health care, if not the most substantial aspect of it, lies not in actual surgery or intense application of a physician’s skills, but in actual care and monitoring of a patient. Nurses saw, time and again, patients readmitted to hospitals for no other reason than that they were not sufficiently caring for themselves at home. A middle ground was clearly in demand, and I believe nurses came forward to fill it, creating entrepreneur resources and roles to do what they themselves had so long done in the hospital environment: ease the transition from ailing patient in need of direct medical attention to self-sufficient individual requiring only moderate health care attention.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Most obviously, the doctor or nurse who, independently or in concert with others, opens up their own health care facility faces daunting responsibilities. Any small business introduces to the entrepreneur an often unforeseen array of difficulties, most of them regulatory. Suddenly, concerns with matters ranging from hiring and scheduling staff to paying rent are present, and are often not in the entrepreneur’s experience.

Then, as regards health care especially, there is the enormous challenge of generating the following needed to make the enterprise successful. People will automatically give their trust to a hospital; it is in essence an American monolith, frequently turned to in desperation and often unquestioned solely because of that reason. Offering a health care service, particularly in the nursing field and when a physician’s license is not hanging on the wall, demands a determination to secure a client base through thoroughly professional and genuinely caring services. Only this can ensure that the public grows to fully trust the entrepreneur’s services in so personal and important an arena.

Fortunately for the nursing entrepreneurs, increased dissatisfaction with impersonal and uncaring hospital treatment may abet their goals. In a very real senses the nurse entrepreneur is far better positioned to maintain a successful health care business by virtue of that “middle ground” place they have historically held. People hostile to hospital environments most commonly dread the actual, physician-administered procedures for which they must go to them. As the classically comforting element in the scenario, the nurse further lessens the drastic association of the hospital experience when the nursing required can be accomplished in a different setting, or even in the home of the patient.

At Work in Real Life

“Self-employed nurses report enhanced job satisfaction, especially in relation to empowerment for making a difference in the lives of the patients with whom they work…” (Zaccagnini, White, 2010, p.414). This is evident to me through an example of health care entrepreneurship with which I have had direct contact, a nurse who, in league with several other nurses, operates a facility devoted to rehabilitative therapies.

The patients these nurses treat are, thus far, both known to them through prior hospital cares or referred by the same. The business, relatively new, already indicates the need for expansion, as the patients are enjoying modes of treatment far preferable to what they had encountered in hospitals visits. The therapies they undergo are unique in both severity and cause, and the personal, more focused attention this nurse and her staff provides actually serves to facilitate the treatment. In this entrepreneurial setting, a more attractive and less pressured environment also  helps to create a more healing atmosphere.

I believe, again, that health care entrepreneurship will evolve into a more impressive aspect of the industry than we have yet seen. Freeing the practitioner from corporate restraints of hospitals, it as well enables the patient to enjoy genuinely specialized, and personalized, care.

References

Drake, D. F. (1994.)  Reforming the Health Care Market: An Interpretive Economic History. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Zaccagnini, M., and White, K. (2010.) The Doctor of Nursing Practice Essentials: A New Model for Advance Practice Learning. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.