The Role of Human Resources in Healthcare

5 years ago | Posted in: Business | 6543 Views

Healthcare is one of the most sought after markets for job seekers. The critical nature of healthcare is that it must be people centered, focusing on the patient and their families.

Human resources serves as the liaison between the employee and management in an organization. They make the decisions when it comes to hiring, firing, and developing employees through their career lives.

How does human resources interact with healthcare?

Staffing

HR in healthcare plays an important role in the hiring of talent. Healthcare professionals are not easy to come by. They are well trained, well educated, and ready to tackle an endless array of issues on a day to day basis. Hiring the right talent is the key to piece to successful staffing in healthcare.

Changes in the working population of the last 10 years due to the baby boomer generation retiring has sparked a renewed interest in the talent search for most human resource professionals. In truth, there is a dire shortage of healthcare professionals from office nurses, hospital nurses to physicians. The human resource task is to seek out talent and acquire their skills through a careful selection process.

Retention

The HR department is responsible for acquiring the necessary talent for healthcare, but the role of retention plays an equally critical role. A healthcare organization may hire the best talent in the world, but it does little good to watch the talent walk away after only a few years of employment.

So, what can human resources do to ensure the talent stays?

The HR role is to ensure employees’ needs are being met, going above and beyond the paycheck. Employees want to be trained more, learn more, and develop more as individuals in their practice or field. HR should inhibit these practices through continuing education courses, versatile training, and inter-field work. This keeps the employee engaged and out of the “hamster mode”. Ongoing learning is key to understanding how to perform the job better, and in a more educated manner.

Recognition

The work of human resources in healthcare is to ensure the employee does not feel like just another number. Healthcare is a demanding field, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Employees in the field face demands that are outside of the normal parameters of a typical job. Therefore, recognition should be instilled by the human resource department to ensure the employee feels respected and appreciated for their work.

Leadership Training

It has been said that employees do not leave jobs, they leave managers. How can this be circumvented in healthcare? The HR role in healthcare is to supply and support leadership training of management. This helps to avoid the cookie cutter atmosphere which many organizations fall into whether or not they intend to. In the healthcare industry, where human relationships is key, it is vital that management understands and respects all sides of a situation.

HR carries the weight of training managers to be compassionate and understanding while maintaining a strategic stance as a manager. With this methodology, the manager does not lose grasp of their primary function but develops an understanding of being a people-focused manager.

Summary

Healthcare is one of the most demanding careers in the professional world. The role of human resources in healthcare is to acquire the necessary talent for the growth of the health care organization, maintain that level of talent as a means of strengthening the overall effectiveness of the organization, and lastly, train leadership to manage employees from a human, compassionate angle in order to ensure the retention of the employee. Since a healthcare organization is built upon human connections and relationships with the patient, human resources plays an important role in ensuring those relationships are not destroyed.

by: Dennis Hung

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