Shouldice Hospital Case

The Shouldice hospital is very successful as elaborated in exhibit 1. Most importantly, the Shouldice hospital manages to distinguish itself by specializing in hernias, using the unique Shouldice method. They deliver a superior offering on the core service, but this is not the most important performance measure. The Shouldice method extends beyond the OR and creates an experience almost like a vacation. The fact that word-of-mouth is the main driver in getting new patients combined by the high attendance at reunions indicates great success. The special atmosphere combined with the good procedure is crucial in the service strategy and makes it hard for competitors to copy.

A lot of factors contributed to this success, as shown in exhibit 2.

One important success factor is the service delivery process. This has been carefully designed to make the patients part of the service delivery. The aim of this is twofold. By having patients doing exercise and interacting with each other, less nurses and housekeeping are needed. To add to that the collective experience patients get, are actually increasing their satisfaction with the overall experience. By keeping backend operations at a minimum and focusing on what really matters to the patient, Shouldice is showing a customer centric approach.

There are different pro’s and con’s for expansion of the hospital’s capacity, as shown in exhibit 3. This paper suggests introducing weekend operations to increase capacity by 20%. This initiative would secure that the crucial Shouldice-experience can continue to be controlled while still increasing supply. The greatest challenge is to get Dr. Degani to cooperate. If management get him onboard it is likely that the remaining surgeons will follow. The Saturday operations could provide an opportunity for the successor of Dr. Degani to gain valuable experience. Management could cooperate with Dr. Degani in selecting the most promising candidate and after extensive training by Dr. Degani, that person could run Saturday operations. This would potentially make Dr. Degani in favor of weekend operations, without compromising the quality of operations.

Management could utilize the younger staff that are likely to be more flexible regarding working hours and stress the fact that working Saturday would call for a day of during the week. Furthermore patients are already in the facility over weekends as well as clients might respond well to the possibility of weekend