Knowledge and skills of management among the hospital managers in Mongolia

Objective: This study aims to provide information regarding the demographic profiles, management knowledge and skills of hospital managers and extend of needs in management training and the appropriate methods of organizing the training.
Method: Non-experimental, analytic, cross-sectional study design was used in the study. The 200 hospital managers from randomly selected 8 tertiary hospitals in UB and 11 aimag’s hospital participated in the study. The study was conducted by quantitative and qualitative methods.
Results: The findings of this study demonstrates that hospital managers have an average 20 years of work experience, where 8 years spends for managerial position, and almost 5 years have been working in current post. The professionally skilled doctors are selected without their willingness, 96.5 % of managers were selected by their colleagues or appointed from the ‘top’.
The 1/3 of the hospital managers attend seminars where they get new information and 63.0% of them didn’t attend any official management trainings. The overload of (clinical plus administrative) work, low salary and the scarcity of management books and trainings were the main limitations of hospital managers to improve their management knowledge and skills.
Hospital managers considered their management knowledge as average, but average “F” score on knowledge test (general management-38.75%, hospital management-52.20%) showed management knowledge among hospital managers was quite low. The self –assessed and skill test score showed that management skill among hospital managers are quite enough and similar for all position in the hospital. The motivation skills, skills of support others and skills of changing and development of the team were the worst in scale.
The management training need of hospital managers (96.5%) was the same high as primary health managers (93.5%) in 2001 and there was no difference by locations.
On General management- planning, business planning, health economics & finance, health marketing and human resource management; on Hospital management - hospital financing, hospital insurance, hospital standard & quality, ward management, ethics and communication were the most needed topics and should include in the curriculum of the trainings.
Conclusion: The management knowledge among hospital managers is poor and there is an urgent need to organize management trainings for the hospital managers according to specific needs founded in the study.