Revamping Your Hospital's Mission Statement

Who am I? Why am I here?

Oh the questions of human existence. They should also be the questions of your hospital's existence. Mission statements can be for the organization as a whole, but also for each part of the organization that feeds into the larger mission. Whether your mission is for the organization or for the med/surg first floor, your mission should have the same characteristics:

1. Missions should be broad in scope but specific in action - You don't want your mission statement to put your organization in a box. "We will treat elderly women who have breast cancer." That may be a great mission for a department, but it doesn't allow innovation and creativity in the services your organization offers.

2. Mission statements aren't meant to change with the newest fad - Mission statements are meant to last the test of time. Your mission statement in the 90's may have been to develop an organization to meet the needs of managed care. However, we have seen managed care decline dramatically, and that would not be an appropriate mission for today.

3. Your mission statement should specifically identify the market that you serve - This is the who, what, when, and where of your statement. Some hospitals may serve a town, some may serve at state, and some may serve a special group (think the VA).

4. Your mission statement should convey the special qualities of your organization - This is about how your differentiate yourself in the marketplace. It helps you to distinguish your hospital from the one in the town 10 miles away. As we talked about in earlier posts, service quality can be a great way to differentiate yourself from your competitor.

Examples of Quality Through Strategy

There are three great examples of hospitals and clinics that have differentiated themselves on the quality of their services.

The Johns Hopkins Hospital
The Cleveland Clinic
The Mayo Clinic

If you read the mission statements of each of these hospitals, the common theme of all of them is patient care comes first. By focusing on the quality of the patient experience, these hospitals will never have to worry about having patients in their hospital. Patients will seek them out and the bottom line of the institution will be better for it.

Mission Impossible

Everyone has to have a mission statement. At least that is the conventional wisdom that hospital have taken from the for-profit world. I've been looking at many mission statements from various types of institutions and find many of them lacking. In particular, I looked at mission statement for these institutions.

Johns Hopkins Hospital -
To be the world's preeminent health care institution
To provide the highest quality care and service for all people in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of human illness
To operate cooperatively and interdependently with the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University to support education in the health professions and research and development into causes and treatment of human illness
To be the leading health care institution in the application of discovery
To attract and support physicians and other health care professionals of the highest character and greatest skill
To provide facilities and amenities which promote the highest quality care, afford solace and enhance the surrounding community.

Google - Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Aetna - Aetna is dedicated to helping people achieve health and financial security by providing easy access to safe, cost-effective, high quality health care and protecting their finances agaisnst health related risks.


When I look at these three statements, I think about how useful they are. If I had to rank them they would be Google as the best and Hopkins as the worst. The reason being is that I believe a good mission statement is short, concise, but not vague. As an employee at Google, I would know what to think about to bring value to the organization. At Hopkins, I'm not so sure.

Interestingly enough, I looked up the mission statement of a hospital in Maryland that I knew was having financial and operational difficulties. The mission was no where to be found. This teaches us that short is better than long, direct is better than vauge, but something is obviously better than nothing.