Operations Management Case Study 2

Members Albert Basumatary, Hiren Gohil,

Prashant Tataskar, Vamsi Krishna

Shouldice Hospital Case Study

Group 13
Section B
Problems Statement and Analysis:
Dr. Shouldice was concerned about few of the problems
pertaining to the hospital.

He was seeking ways to increase the capacity of the hospital

as currently they were having around 1200 backlogs.

At the same time he wanted maintain the control over the

quality of the service provided

Future role of the government in operations of the hospital,

Use of the hospitals name by the potential competitors and

Selection of the next chief surgeon, successor of Dr. Odemy

who was then 65 years old.

Options to start operations on Saturday:

According to the case the hospital didnt work on weekends and the
cases which were to be operated late on Fridays remain non
operated till the weekends were over. To combat this, Dr. Shouldice
had desire to start to work on Saturdays. The staff was not very
pleased about this. Also four old surgeons, including Dr. Odemy
were in opposition but few younger surgeons either were indifferent
or supporting. There were possibilities that could had driven a
wedge between the two groups.
In our opinion, the hospital should work extend its operation on
weekends. Employees should be given incentive to work on
Saturdays and at least they should try to finish the operations which
use wait in weekends. Younger surgeons who are willing to work on
Saturdays should be employed to take up operations.
Adding another floor or open the new facility outside
Toronto
Another issue was to increase the capacity of hospital. Two
probable solutions were either to invest $2 million at Toronto itself
with governments permission to increase the capacity by 20% by
adding one more floor to the premise or open a another facility
1

Operations Management Case Study 2

Members Albert Basumatary, Hiren Gohil,
Prashant Tataskar, Vamsi Krishna

outside the Toronto facility.

a) Investment in adding the no. of floors will lead to increase in
number of beds by 50%.
b) This will lead to decrease in backlog.
c) As patients from outside Toronto do not prefer to visit hospital
in winters so opening a facility outside the Toronto will be
profitable. Considering the fact that 600000 hernia operations
were expected to be done in US alone, opening the facility in
US is profitable. This way they can reduce the load on Toronto
site as patients from US will visit the new facility.
d) At US facility they can expand other services viz. eye surgery
or varicose veins.

Issue of Shouldice name used by potential competitors

Physicians outside were using methodologies used by Shouldice
hospital and remarking that it was not giving good results to them.
This is due to the fact they were not trained enough. Even Shouldice
received mails from patients from other physician regarding the
non-effectiveness of their methodologies. This was bringing bad
name to the hospital.
a) They should run a certificate program to train physician
outside.
b) They should even do patents of their methodologies to
prevent unauthorized use of their methods.
Selection of new chief surgeon
There was a concern for selecting the successor for Dr Odemy
who was 65 years old.
a) We recommend to consider Dr Bryen Shouldice to be the
successor as he is 53 yeard old and was an experienced
surgeon.
b) He also owns 50% of the holding of the hospital.