Human resource planning for healthcare
The WHO defines HR (human resources for health) planning as “the process of estimating the number of people and the types of knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to achieve predetermined health goals and ultimately state goals of health”.
Human resource planning is a dynamic process, it consists of 3 stages; inventory, forecast and design of temporary workforce. In the first stage of inventory, the recruitment and selection of key types of employees are aligned with the strategic business plan to achieve specific objectives. The second stage of forecasting is subdivided into two phases, forecasting the future needs of people (forecasting demand) and forecasting the availability of people (forecasting supply). The third and final phase involves a flexible strategy to hire temporary employees based on needs assessment and profitable benefits.
1. Inventory: – The principle is to identify how many people are needed at each level of the organization to achieve business objectives, in line with overall strategic plans, and what kind of knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics these people need. .
Optimal staffing of modern health services requires many different types of staff. These include; –
1. Clinical workers: doctors and nurses.
2. Technical personnel for diagnostic services, such as laboratory and radiology, pharmacy personnel.
3. Environmental health workers, such as health inspectors.
4. Preventive and promotional personnel, such as community health workers, administrative personnel, etc.
In a healthcare organization, the traditional quantitative approach is used to make enumerative judgments based on the subjective prediction of managers to allocate certain budgets for employee payroll expenses and the needs assessment of key employees that empower the response to the system and organizational design. Resource allocations are best executed with the help of activity-based cost management, which controls the costs and labor required for a specific job / event and reduces waste.
For example: Comparative rates of health activity: –
Hospital care bed days per capita
Acute care bed days per capita
Acute care staff ratio: staff per bed
Acute care nurse ratio: staff per bed
Hospital admissions per 1000 inhabitants
Acute care income per 1000 inhabitants
Medical consultation per capita.
The types of health personnel in a particular country are dictated by the types of health services provided and the level of technology available.
For instance: –
Nature of the health organization: primary, secondary and tertiary.
Types of sector: public, private, non-profit organization.
Infrastructure: hospital size (200 beds, 400 beds, 1000 beds).
Providers of general (multispecialized) or specific (cardiovascular, oncological) care.
2. Forecast: –
Demand forecasting: – Medical workforce planning is complex and determined by relatively mechanical estimates of the demand for healthcare. Dr. Thomas L. Hall (1991) proposed 5 generic methods to estimate the demand for medical care, such as
1. Personnel / population relationship method: – This method calculates the relationship between the number of
Personnel compared to population count. However, with inappropriate data available, it has serious limitations, such as that it is only applicable with acceptable health conditions, a stable health sector, and limited planning capacity.
2. The health needs method: -This method requires and translates the opinion of experts on the health needs of people to the requirements of the staff. Health needs are derived from determining disease-specific mortality and morbidity rates. Staffing requirements are assessed from standards for the number, type, frequency, and quality of services, and staffing standards that convert services into time requirements for a given category of healthcare workers to perform the services. This method initiates the need for a sophisticated data system and survey capabilities, and a high level of planning expertise that are not readily available.
3. The service demand method: -This method accounts for the amount and types of health services that people will use at an anticipated cost to obtain them, rather than their professionally determined need for such services. This specifically provides data on the economic regression related to the use of the private health sector compared to the government-funded health sector.
4. The managed care system approach: – The managed care system involves a known client population who would have reasonably good access to health services. The sociopolitical trends of flexible objectives and the economic recession influence the policies of reform of the health system.
Supply forecast: –
Forecasting the supply of human resources implies the use of information from the internal and external labor market. The calculation of staff turnover and workforce stability rates measures internal supply for human resource planning. The external labor market offers a detailed spectrum on supply shortages, demographic factors, and social / geographic aspects.
Internal supply: – The assessment of the gross number of people needed for a specific job and the arrangements for other provisions of the human resource processes, such as training and development programs, transfer and promotion policies, retirement, career planning and others , are of crucial importance in maintenance. constant supply of HR in an organization.
1. Stock and Flow Model: – This model tracks the employee’s path through the organization over time and attempts to predict how many employees are needed and where in the organization.
a) Waste analysis; – This analysis refers to the rate at which people leave the organization, or represents the turnover rate.
The number of people leaving in a specific period.
Waste analysis = x 100
The average number of employees in the same period.
b) Stability analysis (Bowey, 1974): – This method is useful to analyze the degree of waste in terms of service duration.
Total duration of service of the labor employed at the time of the analysis
Stability analysis = x 100
Total possible duration of service if there had been no wasted labor
2. Replacement cadres: – The replacement cadre is a list of employees for promotion, selected according to the opinions and recommendations of higher-ranking people (Mello, 2005). Some replacement tables are more systematic and show an employee’s skills, abilities, competencies, and experience levels.
3. Succession Planning: – An aging workforce and an emerging wave of “baby boom” retirement is driving the need for a new management process known as succession planning that involves analyzing and forecasting the talent potentials to run the job. business strategy.
Will Powley, senior manager of consulting for the performance solutions group at GE Healthcare, says the first step in effective succession planning is a quarterly talent review that begins with a review of the hospital or healthcare system organization chart.
In a 2008 White Paper on Succession Planning, GE Healthcare identified some of the best healthcare practices for succession planning:
1. Identify and develop talent at all levels.
2. Evaluate top performing talent rigorously and repeatedly
3. Closely link talent management with outsourcing
4. Maintain the active participation of senior management
5. Emphasize leadership at work and personalized employee development.
6. Create systematic talent reviews and follow-up plans.
7. Maintain a dialogue with potential future leaders.
External supply: – HR managers use external information, such as statistics on the organization’s labor market and external labor market, in other words, external and internal statistics.
External statistics: – Graduate profile
Unemployment rates
Skill levels
Age profile
Graduate Profile: – There is substantial public sector regulation of all healthcare markets, and entry into the labor market is severely restricted by professional and licensing regulations.
Unemployment rates: – There is a lack of economic principles, the role of incentives is largely ignored and the elasticity of supply in the labor market is mostly unknown and little researched.
Skill levels: – Higher education (specialization and superspecialization) is proportionally restricted to limited admission places governed by medical regulatory bodies.
Age Profile: – Hiring charts provide details of employee hire, retention, return, and early retirement rates, helping to list future vacancy, shortage, and replacement need rates.
Internal statistics: – Demographic profile
Geographical distribution
Demographic profile: – Demographic changes (for example, the number of young people entering the labor force) affect the external supply of labor. The age composition of the workforce will force a review of hiring policies. The increasing trend in the proportion of women employed has led to a progressive development of both the organization and the country.
Geographical distribution: – The attraction of labor to urban areas is influenced by the following reasons; employment opportunity, access to facilities – transportation and technology, and others.
3. Temporary workforce planning: –
Herer & Harel (1998) classify temporary workers as: temporary employees, contract employees, consultants, leased employees, and subcontractors.
High social costs have initiated a worksharing strategy that is flexible and provides more benefits, such as
1. The number and hours of temporary part-time workers can be easily adapted with low maintenance cost to meet the needs of the organization.
2. Employees possessing appropriate / specialized skills benefit functional areas within and outside the organization.
3. It is not responsible for the inscriptions to exclusive benefits, such as job security, pension plan, insurance coverage, etc.
In today’s work environment, outsourcing can be added as a temporary worker planning technique. The outsourcing requirement is evaluated and evaluated based on the cost benefit decision. Outpatient services, diagnostic or pathology testing services, laundry, catering, billing, medical transcription, and others are the outsourcing services most often promoted in healthcare organizations.
