The Wrong Job: Why Swiss Hospitals Are Solving Problems No One Has Anymore

When a hospital director says, “We’ll survive by attracting more inpatients,” something is deeply wrong. (SRF)
That’s the plan from the director of GZO Wetzikon, a regional hospital now on the brink of insolvency.
His logic: more patients, more beds, more of what’s already failing.

But the problem isn’t money. It’s relevance.

Three hospitals, one job

In the Zürich Oberland, you can drive from Wetzikon to Uster or Männedorf in less than 20 minutes.
Three hospitals, three management teams, three emergency departments — all competing for the same patients, staff, and municipal subsidies.

No user ever said, “I wish there were three mid-sized hospitals within a 15-kilometer radius, each doing a bit of everything.”
People just want care that works.
They want speed, quality, and confidence, not local redundancy.

From a Jobs-to-be-Done lens, that’s the core mismatch.
Hospitals think their job is to exist.
Users’ job is to get well, fast, and safely.
Those are not the same thing.

The inside-out mindset

When an institution’s survival becomes the strategy, it’s already lost touch with its users.
At GZO, the argument goes: “We’ll fix the finances by increasing inpatient cases and riding regional population growth.”
But every policy trend — and every patient behavior — points the other way.
Care is moving outpatient, digital, and distributed.

So the director is trying to fill more beds in a world that’s learning how to avoid them.

It’s a classic inside-out move: start from the organization, not the user.

The outside-in reality

From a patient’s perspective, the job isn’t “get admitted.”
It’s: