NHTV FM Conference 2009, Lisbon

This year the subject of the conference 2009 is Facility Management strategies within the health care industry in Europe. The conference will be organized for 100 students, third year Facility management NHTV Breda. Part of the conference is a research project that focuses on determining the strategies the facility manager of a hospital in Europe applies and what the consequences are for the organization, processes and communication. An interesting aspect that will be taken into account is that per country the health-care industry is differently structured and financed in Europe. One of the things we want to find out is: what is the influence of how health care is financed on the strategy of the facility department of a hospital.

Next to that the research will focus on business processes. This will be linked to the operational strategy. According to Johnson, Scholes & Whittington (2008), operational strategies are concerned with how the components parts of an organisation deliver effectively the corporate- and business-level strategies in terms of resources, processes and people. The synergy between the aspects determines the succes of a company. It therefore appears clearly that you need processes in order to realize results (Bakker & Mittelmeijer, 2007). The structured interviews will focus on exploring the exact contribution, effects and relations between the strategy and processes.

The third angel of the research is that we will try to reveal the link between communication and strategy. In most organizations, the choice for one of the generic strategies is elaborated and molded into an own specific organization- and communication strategy (Olsthoorn & van der Velden, 2007). The results of this research will display the extend to which the European hospitals use communication to support their strategy.

From February to April 2009, the students will explore these topics in the Theme Strategy and Communication. The students will do deskresearch to get better insight in the topics and the different angles it contains. Subsequently a structured interview will be developed to exlore the hospitals from the three specific angles. The results of the 45 interviews will be analysed and the most important findings will be presented and discussed at the “International Facility Management Conference 2009” in Lisbon.

The approach of this research offers a unique opportunity for hospitals and students to explore the implications of a changing healthcare industry on the strategy of the facility management branch.