Non-Profit Healthcare Organization-A Comprehensive Study
Introduction

Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI) is a non-profit organization that consists of four separate national Catholic health systems that were combined under CHI over the past three decades. CHI offers assisted living services, nursing home services, memory care, rehabilitation care, hospital care, adult day care services and many other health care services around the nation. One example is the Madonna Manor in Northern Kentucky, which was founded by the Benedictine Sisters in the 1960s, then operated by the Sisters of St. Francis as a subsidiary of CHI in 1998. CHI clearly identifies itself as a non-profit organization on its main website (CHI, 2019) and its mission, vision and values align with the standard idea of what a non-profit should be. This paper will describe the history, leadership and mission, vision and values of the organization to show how it is consistent with non-profit healthcare.

Mission and Vision

One of the main aspects of non-profit nursing homes and health care organizations is that they tend to be more proactive about putting people before profits. In other words, profits are not their primary aim. Their primary aim is to serve the needs of others—and in doing so, by engaging in servant leadership within the community, they develop a reputation for providing genuine, authentic care for people. As a result, they earn the esteem of the community, obtain benefactors and donors to assist with the maintenance of operations, and are sustained through the fees charged for providing care to patients and residents in their homes and beds. As Span (2012) points out, “for years, researchers have reported that ownership status is one of the factors related to quality care. ‘Most studies show that nonprofits do a better job of caring for patients,’ said JiSun Choi, a postdoctoral fellow in nursing and long-term care at the University of Kansas Medical Center School of Nursing.” The reason for this is that non-profits have a mission and vision that is rooted in servant leadership.

Catholic Health Initiatives has a mission, vision and values statement that aligns with the same servant leadership orientation principles that apply to the standard non-profit formula among health care organizations. The mission of CHI is “to nurture the healing ministry of the Church, supported by education and research. Fidelity to the Gospel urges us to emphasize human dignity and social justice as we create healthier communities” (Our Mission, 2019). The mission is rooted in the Christian teachings of the Gospel, which are in and of themselves the essence of servant leadership. Christ is often identified as the original servant leader (Sendjaya & Sarros, 2002). The goal of CHI is also described in the mission statement—to bring greater justice to the community by serving the needs of the members of the community in a Christian spirit. Many non-profits take a religious orientation in their service provisions...…a diverse group of people—from patients and clients to workers and other members of the staff. The manager on the frontline is constantly having to put himself in the shoes of others, and that requires understanding most of all. The manager must also have social and emotional intelligence which allows the manager to understand what is not being communicated orally by reading body language, having knowledge of social contexts and cultural cues so as to be able to provide the right kind of emotional and social supports on an as-needed basis. Servant leadership is needed because this gets to the essence of what the health care organization is all about: tending to the needs of others in the community. And communication is essential because without strong communication flows there will be breakdowns in teamwork and interdepartmental organization as well as a lack of quality care shown to patients.

Conclusion

Catholic Health Initiatives is one of the biggest non-profit health care organizations in the U.S. and once the merger with Dignity Health is complete, it will be the largest non-profit health system in the U.S. It started out as a consolidation firm, bringing smaller regional Catholic health systems under one roof. These health systems included facilities for assisted living, nursing homes, hospitals and so on. Today, CHI is guided by CommonSpirit and the Board of Stewardship Trustees, who oversee the vast array of specialties that CHI now provides across many different states…