HUMAN RESOURCE PLANNING IN HEALTH CARE. B. Ray*. Human beings are
the most important resources in health care. Machines and gadgets which are ...
HUMAN RESOURCE PLANNING IN HEALTH CARE B. Ray*
Human beings are the most important resources in health care. Machines and gadgets which are integral parts of health care require the human touch, expertise, and commitment for their full utility and application in delivery of health care. Therefore planning of human resources is the key to any health care provision. The objective of human resource (HR) policy is to a) attract, recruit, retain and develop competent personnel and b) create a continuously learning health care organisation.
In order to own the system they have to actively participate in designing it. While doing so a cross functional team across various sections brings about greater effectivity and cohesion than an intra departmental team. Some of the examples of such teams are given under the following headings : (i)
Infection control team, waste management team and quality improvement (QIP) team are some of the examples that have been doing good quality work in Tata Main Hospital.
I. TARGET HUMAN RESOURCES IN HEALTH CARE The patient unquestionably is the focus of all health care personnel. While doctors, nurses, hospital attendants, technologists, clinical assistants and pharmacists are directly involved in providing OPD and ward care, administration, public relation, security, catering, laundry, electronics, civil, electrical and air conditioning maintenance are involved in supporting the former for providing safe health care. Planning needs to be done for all these personnel and not only for the direct care givers.
(ii) Encourage and motivate innovation through quality circle (QC), value engineering (VE) and suggestions. There are over 104 quality circles actively functioning in TMH. These are small circles of five members picked up from supervisors and workers who take small local problems and solve them with organisation’s support. Employees are encouraged to do cost savings without affecting the quality through intra or inter departmental teams. Suggestions are encouraged from the employees and wherever appropriate those are implemented.
II. IMPROVEMENT OF HUMAN RESOURCES This is done through three ways such as a) Work system, b) employee education, training and development, and c) employee well being and satisfaction. a)
(iii) Encourage higher learning, give them higher responsibilities and help them identify their training needs. (iv) Encourage multi skilling and rotate their jobs wherever possible so that there is no boredom with the repeatitive type of job. This has been implemented amongst the hospital attendants who rotate in various areas with different job specifications in the hospital.
Work system :
The aim of work system improvement is to get co-operation and collaboration among all employees. Health care employees look for good systems in place so that their endeavours would yield favourable results without any wasteful activities. They would like to participate and feel important in laying down these systems. A system that is thrust on them often breeds cynicism as they do not own it. Sr. Spl. & HOD, Tata Main Hospital
Design/organise formal/informal, temporary or long term units (teams).
(v)
Performance management system:
Every level of employees must work with a purpose and their work must be 14
important thing is to link their training with the patients’ need in the hospital they are working in. In
evaluated against their target from time to time so that they achieve their target at the year end. In TMH, this is done by giving targets to all doctors and officers in the form of key result areas ( KRAs) which are reviewed twice a year. The annual appraisal identifies the “super” achievers who are recognised as fast trackers. They move aggressively and groom rapidly. (vi)
TMH, the deployment of training has been done through regular continuing medical education (CME) for doctors, nurses and technologists, bed side teaching for doctors & nurses, training through joint departmental councils (JDC) for hospital attendants in subjects such as waste management and oxygen therapy.
Compensation, recognition and reward practices
This could be non monetary or monetary. Non monetary recognition could be formal by a letter or informal by a pat on the back in front of other employees. Monetary recognitions are through promotions, special increment, joint department council (JDC) award or long service awards after 20 yrs, 25 yrs, 35 yrs and 40 yrs of service. (vii)
Communication with patients (or relatives) was identified through periodic surveys as one of the weakest links with our employees at all levels. This was repeatedly addressed through “motivation, attitude and time management (MAT)” programme which was designed by a group of highly motivated employees drawn from all sections in TMH.
Communication meetings at all levels Having a training programme in place is not enough. There has to be an evaluation system in place for monitoring the effectiveness of training. The parameters which need to be monitored should be directly related to “patient well-being.” Some such parameters could be catheter induced infection rates, mortality and morbidity parameters, feed back from patients and relatives, number of re-admissions for the same ailment and above all “retaining the customer.”
Communication upward and down-ward helps inculcate among the employees a sense of oneness in the organisation. This is done at a pre-decided interval regularly in TMH. (viii) Recruiting and hiring new employees While recruiting employees, the hospital must first identify the job requirement and while interviewing, an attitudinal and aptitudinal survey of the candidate must be done. Transparency must be practiced while explaining to the candidate his/her future growth in the organisation. The new employee should be made familiar to the working of the hospital through ‘induction’ to various areas before he/she is finally posted to his/her place of work.
(C )
Employee well being and satisfaction
Employee satisfaction is essential for a motivated work force. It will do what a state of the art technology cannot do in health care. This issue could be addressed under three heads such as i) work environment ii) work climate and iii) employee's satisfaction.
(b) Employee education, training and development
(i) Work environment: A healthy work environment needs to be created where employees feel safe to work. Universal precautions need to be enforced; proper disposal of waste should be implemented; periodic health checkup for all the employees need to be done and hepatitis B vaccination should be compulsorily given to all the employees. The organisation needs to identify and safeguard against unsafe practices. Serious
Employees’ education, training and development should be a continuous process. Their training needs in terms of technical, managerial and behavioural aspects should be identified. Short term goals of training need to be directed towards customer satisfaction and reduction of cycle time and long term goals should be towards better technology. The 15
efforts have been made in the past two years in TMH to achieve the desired goals for all the employees in the aforesaid areas.
about its concern for them. DNB course was started in TMH after identifying a long standing need of the graduate doctors in TMH. III.
(ii) Work climate : Every employee needs to be provided with certain awareness programmes and facilities for him or her to feel “proud and being looked after” by the organisation. AIDS awareness programme, cooperative society, injury on duty (IOD) facility, subsidised (no profit - no loss) canteen facility, academic activity and library are some of the measures TMH has provided to improve the work climate. (iii) Employee’s satisfaction: This is not an easy area to tackle. There are few hospitals where most of the employees are satisfied. Human mind is not satisfied with what it has achieved and therefore to expect that employees will be satisfied with certain facilities is far from being true; however the organisation must collect feedbacks through formal/informal assessment methods and relate these findings to identify improvement priorities. This will at least make the employees feel that management is sincere
CONCLUSION
A satisfied human resource is valuable and has no alternative. Human beings’ needs are dynamic and therefore to satisfy those the health care organisation has to be dynamically thinking. Only then our most important customer, the patient, can get his just need fulfilled. Employee's growth and development should be the result of both the employer’s responsibility and the employee’s initiative. Appropriate timely rewards and recognition go a long way in retaining a motivated employee. Inspite of providing all the help and resources if certain human resources can’t be moulded to fit into the organisation’s needs, the organisation should not hesitate to leave them behind. Tata’s H.R philosophy “attract good people, retain the better people and advance the best people” is a right step in this direction. It may appear a bit harsh but at present it appears to be the only scope for a fast changing health care organisation.
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