Identifying health care stakeholders: a key to strategic implementation.

As the number and complexity of stakeholders for health care organizations has increased, health care managers have become more aware of the ability of these groups to thwart or facilitate the implementation of strategic plans. Most stakeholder models have focused on identification of groups within the usual, global definition of affecting or being affected by an organization's actions. The authors argue that stakeholders management is critical to the implementation of strategic plans. They provide a narrower, more operationally useful stakeholder definition and present a framework for assessing the relative importance of each stakeholder for a given situation. The situational evaluation of stakeholders is critical to successful implementation of strategy.