Healthcare Systems
Table of Contents
Healthcare Organizations: Human Resource. 3
Health Care Management: Human Resource Issues. 5
Effects of Human Resources on the Operations of Health Sector. 7
Introduction
For the past decade, the health policy has slowly shifted focus among three areas: access, cost, and the quality of medical care. Globally, health care systems have been given the mandate of delivering better services in the society. With the increase in population, provision of quality health care services has been crucial in order to harness a growing economy. Improvement and provision of quality health care services requires a country to possess a legitimate and reliable managerial team. This will ensure that human resource services, financial plausibility, and risk management is highly articulated with an aim of realizing quality service. Healthcare management is crucial in provisions of directions and leadership to various entities which prioritize on delivering personal healthcare services, and to various units, departments, or divisions within a given organization. Healthcare management aims at providing significant personal satisfaction and rewards for those individuals that are involved in changing the lives of other individuals.
In this research paper, management of healthcare services in an organization pose a critical challenge, and various strategies have been instigated with an aim of combating this adversity. Numerous challenges do exist in this sector, but the key challenge facing managerial team is establishing a critical and reliable human resource. This issue is relevant in the current economy as competition has increased, and there is need to have a working human resource policy and team that will necessitate the healthcare organization’s competitiveness.
Healthcare Organizations: Human Resource
Most of the organizations across the globe are focusing on human resources management (HRM) in order to improve the health care services provided to the public. Ideally, HRM is one of the three key foundations of an organization’s health system, with the others being consumables and physical capital. By definition, Human resources involve various kinds of non-clinical and clinical staff that are responsible for individual and public health intervention (Rigoli and Dussault, 2003). The most significant inputs of health system is its benefits derived from performance which can be delivered to the public depending ion the skills, motivation, and knowledge of the health care employees. The analysis below shows the relationship existing between expenditure categories, budget elements, and the inputs of health system.
From the diagram above, production health interventions requires a health care organization to spend either in the form of capital expenditure or recurrent expenditure. The health system is divided into three major categories: human resources, consumables and physical capital. In realizing consumables, the organization’s budgetary element is recurrent expenditures. Physical capital requires an organization’s investment and maintenance, while human resource input requires the cost associated with training of labor costs.
The human resource balances physical and human resources, as it is crucial in maintaining a mix between a variety of caregivers and health promoters to harness success of the system. With these obvious and significant differences, it is of the essence that human capital resource is managed and handled differently from the other forms of capital. There is complexity on the relationship existing between health care and human resources (Rigoli and Dussault, 2003). Both the cost and quantity of health care consumables—that is disposable equipment, prostheses, and drugs—is increasing over time, the health care managerial team, across the health care sector, has implemented strategies that mitigate these costs. In the case of systems that are publicly funded, expenditures can pose effects on the ways and ability of the management team to recruit personnel and retain effective practitioners. However, in employer-paid and government-funded systems, development of HR practices enhances a balance between the practitioners’ ability and the supply of the workforce in the economy.
Health Care Management: Human Resource Issues
The healthcare management has faced numerous challenges in the process of administering its services and operations. One of the key issues is the variation of composition, distribution and size within a region’s healthcare system. As such, the number of health workers imminent in a particular region demonstrates the effectiveness and quality of medical service to be provided in the region. Demand for quality medical care service has been on the rise and organizations have focused on economic factors of a particular region, socio-demographic characteristics and cultural characteristics (Martineau and Buchan, 2005).
The training of the workforce is spearheaded by the human resources, and this has also been a challenge in most of the healthcare organizations. It is critical for HR personnel to consider diversity in the healthcare workforce that incorporates both training levels and skill categories. Human resource management is always reluctant to incorporate new and modern options for in-service training and education of healthcare workforce. This will necessitate preparedness and awareness of the workforce on the future and present demands of a country. A competent workforce provides relevant and efficient delivery of medical care to the patients.
Health care workers’ migration has been evident with the changes in the managerial skills of employees. According to Martinez and Martineau (2002), workers movement in the health care sector demonstrates the migration pattern imminent in other sectors as the internal movement of workers is always necessitated by ‘greener pastures.’ Most of the healthcare workforce migrates to the urban areas with an aim of increasing their income. Ideally, workforce mobility increases imbalances and an organization requires an efficient HR in order to analyze the changes in payment of the workforce, plan and reward employees’ performances, and improve the management of the heath care workforce. Apart from salary incentives that the workforce enjoys, developed and developing economies have enacted strategies that will attract and retain qualified personnel in the sector. Some of these strategies include job rotation opportunities, improvement of infrastructure, and offering housing facilities to the workforce.
Economic development differs globally, and the remuneration of healthcare workers differs depending on the economic endowment of a given region. According to Martinez and Martineau (2002), a positive correlation exists between the country’s economic development and the number of health care human resources. Countries having a higher gross domestic product (GDP) increases their health care expenditure than economies with lower GDP; as such, having a larger healthcare workforce. Therefore, economic development of a region is crucial when implementing solutions to necessitate effectiveness in managing health care services and recruitment of personnel.
The HR needs to consider socio-demographic elements and this has been ignored by most of the healthcare professionals. Age distribution and gender disparity should be assessed in order for human resource manager to maximize on the available human capital in the region. For instance, high number of healthcare professionals should be deployed to regions with high number of ageing population. This is because the aged population is prone to infectious diseases as their body immune has declined. As such, a health care organization should rely on the human resource department to train young and effective employees.
Consequently, human resources need to articulate to geographical and cultural factors when harnessing the overall success of the health care organizations. Most of the organizations have not equipped the HR with relevant tools and information to ascertain the cultural and geographical perspective of the population (Chankova et al., 2006). Some of the geographical factors that influence delivery of health services includes climate of the region and its topography. The political and cultural values may adversely affect the supply of human capital. Therefore, in order to mitigate such adversity, the management should provide the human resource department with relevant information on the region’s political and cultural characteristics.
Effects of Human Resources on the Operations of Health Sector
As the study focuses on the human resource as a challenge that faces managerial team of a healthcare organization, the analysis of the significance and usefulness of human resources is critical. Without reliable human resources, the management will find it difficult to undertake health sector reforms. Though health care reforms varies across the globe, some trends are common in all the regions—equity, quality objectives and efficiency.
Human resources have enacted initiatives that aim at increasing efficiency of an organization. Outsourcing human capital has been vital in converting fixed labor expenditures into variable costs in order to improve the organization’s efficiency. Internal contracting, performance contracts and contracting-out are some of the initiatives of increasing efficiency.
In addition, some of the initiatives of human resource management aim at increasing fairness or equity. Equity promotion requires systematic planning, and the management should allocate finances to these initiatives if a positive return is desired. The management has failed to channel finances to human resource; therefore, equity has not yet been realized (Chankova et al., 2006).
Healthcare organizations focuses their financial resources to purchase of medical facilities, and they ignore the vital component of the management—human resources. Strategies that need to be implemented include introduction of mechanisms to protect the company’s financial tranquility, targeting a particular group or needs of the population, and re-deploying services. The human resource managerial objective should be to inculcate these strategies in its plan as it will increase fairness in resource distribution and remuneration of employees.
Quality of services is also one of the significance of coherent and reliable human resource management. Like other profit-making organizations, consumer satisfaction is the main objective of health care organization. The quality of health care services should either be socio-cultural quality or technical quality. In the case of technical quality, it shows the impact of the health services available on the population’s health conditions. Socio-cultural quality shows thee degree in which the services provided can be accepted by the public and its ability to meet the consumer’s expectations.
Though these initiatives may be easy to achieve, human resource managers face numerous hurdles in attempting to deliver quality services to the society. Some of the constraints include lack of conscience between stakeholders, budgets, high rates of turnover, absenteeism rates, and lack of motivation on healthcare workforce.
Analysis and Discussion
Human resource is crucial in every organization. Having a coherent and reliable human resource team ensures that the organization’s activities are undertaken with ease. In health care system, the key inputs that make the organization to operate efficiently include consumables, physical capital and human resources. Consumables and physical capital do not pose serious challenge to the organization, as the difficulty can be offset with the availability of sufficient resources. However, an organization needs to enact measures that will necessitate developing the human resource input, managing, motivating, maintaining and retaining existing workforce. The initiatives undertaken by the human resource ensures that organizational culture is improved, efficiency and effectiveness is realized across all sectors of the health sector. Health care services are delivered by professional people; therefore, there is need to consider management of people—implying a positive contribution of the human resource professional (Chankova et al., 2006).
Human resources professionals appreciate the significance of developing a unifying organizational culture. Diversity of employees requires a culture that will unify the different aspects of people’s characteristics and behaviors, and this will enhance realization of the organization’s strategic goals and objectives. The HR needs to understand how the societal practice and behavior can be used to establish common interests and goals. Understanding the significance of aligning the organization’s interests and goals to those of the society will necessitate harmony and prevent conflict of interest.
With the global changes in the health care sector, strategic planning cannot be achieved without the contribution of human resources. However, most of the health care organizations have ignored the significance of human resource professionals in providing strategic plan for the organizations. The human resource management is always positioned at the organization’s functional and managerial levels. When the HR is involved in top-level decision making process, it will ensure that some of the issues affecting the human resource are addressed and considered in the long run operations of the health care organization. The management should define the core responsibilities of the HR professionals, which will also include operations, finance, or strategic decisions. With such initiative, the organization will be assured of educational preparedness in addition to work experience in regard to other organization’s functional areas.
Conclusion
Health care systems in most of the developing and developed countries are under pressure to perform. The global economic crisis has not only affected the profit-making organizations, but also the health care organizations. Measures need to be undertaken in order to enhance efficient operations in the healthcare organizations. Though human resource may be perceived to be an inferior department in an organization, it is the work of the HR professionals that ensures smooth-flow of operations across all the departments. However, the management has failed to consider the positive aspects attributed to the human resource. Minimal attention has been channeled to the department, and this poses serious challenges to the activities of the organization. Since the healthcare operations are undertaken by people, there is need of a strong understanding of the issues related to human resources management in order to realize success in the health care initiatives. Furthermore, the success of other organizations in different field is attributed to the reliability and relevancy of human resource management. Extensive research should be undertaken in an attempt to understand human resources practices and policies that will benefit the society.
References
Chankova, S., Kombe, G., Decker, C. & Kimani, G. (2006). Rising to the challenges of human resources for health in Kenya: Developing empirical evidence for policy making. Partners for Health Reformplus. Accessed on 17th February, 2013. Retrieved from<https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:PNo9C8VY9RoJ:www.healthsystems2020.org/files/1654_file_Tech101_fin.pdf+&hl=en&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESg41xsIEd4oGJjEPlp5wqh8anHY1cwTNY7o6pPahLyMIhDEYvsqPiTyI0TsLvtn1JjmYxxHyyAdML7otCc5hU0ozORbSzqiCDCcKlxLqm9tGJ1J8aJD5U1SMy70RBMTz4FI_yVW&sig=AHIEtbSIs8GVXcUYmw0jrdGdKdcPZIo8AQ>
Martineau T. & Buchan, J. (2005). Human Resource and the success of health sector, DFID Health Systems Resource Center. Accessed on 18th February, 2013. Retrieved from <http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Vfz4k7O3ungJ:www.who.int/hrh/en/HRDJ_4_3_05.pdf+&hl=en>
Martinez, J. & Martineau, T. (2002). Human resources in the health sector: an international perspective, DFID Health Systems Resource Center. Accessed on 18th February, 2013. <https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:b-lhdtRsvWQJ:hdrc.dfid.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Human-resources-in-the-health-sector.pdf+&hl=en&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgv_3v8MkCuM0e66IGuiEZQImwgnPz_7XV-PAoYWY_MzeAmxT7U_z0piXu_omsFHRoR80Q7_vee7W5gkEfWvwZ16zvf__Uv0TKJV3ChAlKo1VVaZ0Aka-uyIJFuTE3r4XE–qcv&sig=AHIEtbQlozmVPzfp1L4kbtbpWMJ3RPLY5w>
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