Strategic Planning Project Part 3

                                                 St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

            St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is paving the way to treating life-threatening childhood diseases, and ensuring that no family every receives a bill for any expenses such as treatment, housing, travel, and food. With a vision statement of “Finding cures. Saving Children.” (stjude.org) and a mission statement that states that they wish to “advance cures, and means of prevention, for pediatric catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. Consistent with the vision of our founder Danny Thomas, no child is denied treatment based on race, religion or a family’s ability to pay.” (ibid.) St. Jude is leading the way hospitals and doctors treat life-threatening diseases. However, they only have one location to do their research and treatment that is based out of Memphis, Tennessee. While the hospital has partnered with others all over the world, many of them cannot compete or keep up with everything that the main hospital offers to families. In this case study, I will begin with a SWOT analysis of the hospital, and end by analyzing St. Jude Global.

            A SWOT analysis is a business tool that examines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a business. With the uniqueness of how St. Jude’s conducts their organization, there have been multiple SWOT analyses performed when being used for different case studies. I will be looking at Fern Fort University’s SWOT analysis as well as one that I created after looking at their website for this part of the assignment.

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has many strengths. For starters, since Danny Thomas founded the hospital over 50 years ago, the hospital has recorded that the “Treatments invented at St. Jude have helped push the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20% to more than 80%” (stjude.org) which is for a lack of a better word, amazing. They are saving lives every day and although they cannot save everyone, being able to push the survival rate of childhood cancer by 60% is very beneficial to hospitals all over the world. As a result of this “St. Jude Children’s Hospital is leading the way the world understands, treats and defeats childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases.” (ibid.) Another strength that the founder never believed that the families of the patient will “never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food” (ibid.). As we are aware of, any medical help or treatment in the States is outrageously expensive, and no one wishes to every have a life-threatening disease let alone wish it upon a child, so the hospital relies on its funding to come from donations, and in some cases insurance companies to cover the cost of all expenses. Although this has its issues, which I will discuss later, this system has worked for over 50 years now and is saving families money that could be used for other things. They also share whatever treatments they have found in their research to other hospitals all over the world. And finally, St. Jude wants to give each patient a normal childhood or as close to one as possible. Because of this they treat all patients as outpatients (stjude.org). Afterall, they are treating a child who should be at home playing with their friends and family and going to school, not stuck in a hospital bed. They are also partnered with the PGA which often holds events to raise awareness and money for the hospital so they can continue their life saving work.

St. Jude’s has a few weaknesses. These weaknesses are primarily cost based. According to Fern Fort University’s SWOT analysis, they found that in comparison to other research hospitals, they have a “higher attrition rate and have to spend a lot more compared to its competitors” (fernfortuniversity.com). This is true as they are a non-for-profit organization and cover the cost of all the expenses of each family that they help. On top of this, Fern Fort explains that their “Financial planning is not done properly and efficiently.” (ibid.) Of course this is true based on their model. When looking at the hospital’s website, it says that “an estimated 89% of the funds necessary to sustain and grow St. Jude must be raised by ALSAC from generous donors who are united with us in a common goal: Finding cures. Saving children.” (st.jude.org) If 89% of the funding you get is from one specific charity, it makes it harder for you to be financially stable. This causes issues with being able to treat every patient that comes to them needing the life saving help they require or pay for the expenses they list that they provide the families and makes it harder to expand. This funding issue is a massive one that explains why there is only one location and they only have a license for a total of 80 beds. For what they are doing for the world, they need to expand and try to get licensing for more than 80 beds. And the 80 beds license and one location are the other main weaknesses that the hospital has. 

As there were not a lot of opportunities and threats to the hospital, I will be pairing the two together. For opportunities, they have a few. These opportunities are to partner with other charities so they would not depend on the ALSAC and donors, partner with different airlines to cover the cost of travel, and expand or to fully partner with other hospitals. As mentioned above, it is hard for them to expand as most of their income comes from one specific charity and as of right now, that money is being used to sustain the current and only location. So, in this case, the other opportunity is to fully partner with other children’s hospitals all over the world. The hospitals would use the same principles and research techniques as the main location and trade information amongst them, but not be called a St. Jude hospital. Kind of the same way that sister schools or towns work. This way, not only would the cost of most expenses be covered from wherever they are located and the families would not have to travel, but their practices would be preformed all over the world. The only issue with that would be stepping in to financially help with and train doctors in hospitals in low- or middle-class countries as they may not have the same resources as upper-class countries do. Finally, the only threat that I could find was the risk of not having enough donations or having the ALSAC pulling out of their deal with the hospital. If that happens, then they would need to find another source of income, become a for-profit, or close which would not be good. 

St. Jude has a global organization that is called St. Jude Global. St. Jude Global recognizes that more than 90% of children that live with the life-threatening diseases the hospital studies and treats lives in low-and middle-income countries (stjude.org). In this they team up with the Department of Global Pediatric Medicine to “create a network of interactive institutions that will form a global alliance focused on reducing this gap worldwide.” (Ibid.) Their approach consists of three aspects: (1) education, (2) capacity building and patient-centered care, and (3) research (ibid.). Through these aspects they were able to expand their unique operational model to multiple low-and middle-income countries. In their expansion, they were able to partner with 24 hospitals throughout 17 different countries in Central America, South America, and all over the Eastern hemisphere (ibid.). This organization has sadly only affected roughly 3% of children worldwide, but hopes to grow in the future. St. Jude Global has taken the expansion opportunity and has taken off with it to help those around the world. While everyone is still welcome to get their treatment in Tennessee, being able to partner with these other hospitals will be very beneficial for each country in the long run and takes some of the stress away from the main organization about expanding to other countries.

Bibliography:

Fern Fort University. (n.d.). St. Jude Medical SWOT analysis matrix (strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats). Fern Fort University. Retrieved November 15, 2022, from http://fernfortuniversity.com/term-papers/swot/1433/465-st--jude-medical.php

St. Jude Children's research hospital. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. (n.d.). Retrieved November 15, 2022, from https://www.stjude.org/?sc_dcm=18579025627&sc_cid=pMax&gclid=CjwKCAiAjs2bBhACEiwALTBWZSIR7G2l99miNH-IYY0GiY5mq-1uAVMtxrThnRVtAQN-AaNbR0Co8BoC6TwQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds