Governments Procurement Methods in Integrated Public Service

Integrated Public Service
Introduction
PPPs, as they have come to be popularly referred, are methods of procurement by governments where there is a larger number of stakeholders involving the government, the private sector, and the general public is securing services and, or goods. The model focuses on the delivery of services, products, and infrastructure to the public. The areas under focus transcend a broad span, including water treatment, transportation, health, education, energy, environment, among others. It is a common belief that PPP is a great approach to handle the provision of services and products to the public. The procurement strategy is known as the Public-Private Partnership. As the name suggests, the program is meant to encourage the government to involve the private sector and the general public in the provision of public services. There are conflicting views regarding the process of negotiation, participation by the public and private financiers, and accountability. In recent days, a lot of research has been focusing on the implementation of PPPs. The Public-Private Partnership programs have been put to use in both developed and developing countries.
Implementation
Experience shows that PPPs have been hard to handle from the onset. For the program to succeed, there has to be trust between the public and the private sector. There is additionally a demand to change the traditional mindset. The public sector mindset should move from being a regulator to being a facilitator of projects that the public would derive benefits from while at the same time serving as stimulators of the economy. The private sector, on its part, must shift its thinking from just being the adversarial applicant for public tenders and permits to an economic partner and collaborator. It should evolve into transparency and sit at the negotiating table to vouch for partnerships in profitable public projects. Still, it is necessary to create effective PPPs now than ever before because the public sector needs are enormous and dynamic.
While it is true that PPPs are still in their early stages of implementation in developing countries, there have been various proposals, and many have been adopted or tried. There are also case studies that have been widely used elsewhere. These initiatives have stimulated further research in PPPs. The result has been the development of new PPP models, frameworks, issues to do with concession, project financing, risk management, allocation, and critical success factors (CSFs). While there have been numerous efforts to streamline PPPs, efforts to streamline their framework have been random.
Further, the development trends of PPP research are still unclear. There has been some research to establish the trends by analysis of the content of popular construction magazines, but the researchers still have little to show for objectivity. The problems are associated with a lack of understanding by the given researchers.
Integration of Public and Private Organizations
When the internal and external factors of a company blend successfully, organizational integration happens. Every company has its unique internal characteristics, such as the style of management, organizational culture, staff, strategies, and even organizational structure. External traits include the business model, the mission, input, the technology used, the political environment, economy, routine, stakeholders, and social setup. When the level of organizational integration is determined, the success of an organization evaluated, and ways of improving it are identified.
For the present project, I will create a public organization on the one hand, and a private one on the other. The intention is to integrate them and demonstrate how PPPs can work best for the two under the integrated partnership. The two organizations are drawn from the government and the private sector, respectively. The two companies will enter a long term arrangement in which the private organization uses private capital to develop or renovate health facilities, and accents to providing service to the public over an extended period. The contract is weaved around a specific project and points out operational, clinical service standards that the private organization should meet and the financial obligations.
In the arrangement, the government will keep its role in paying for healthcare services. In some situations, the government will not make any payments to the private partner until the construction of structures is completed, and service delivery starts. This arrangement can run from 2 to 4 years from the beginning of the contract. Such a position encourages the timely delivery of the agreed contract items designed to the expected standards. The government will also make use of the arrangement to extend its services to areas that have not been covered before, including regions with a high poverty index such as slums and rural areas. On the financial front, the facilities built are expected to return value for money for patients and the government. The partnership will balance out the cost at the point of service, where patients either pay the same as before or less for the same service.
Funding
The partnership will offer a solution across the board by the private partner actively taking part in designing, constructing, and maintaining the health structures. They will also offer clinical services in the same premises. The holistic design of this partnership will make it stand out from the finance initiatives run by the private sector or other PPPs which do not deal with clinical service provision. Just like it happens in other sectors, access to private capital facilitates the funders to push for aggressive design and completion of public projects, which involve a huge business arrangement that calls for sustainability. While such follow up can be over-demanding if there are no resources, and for the strained ministries of health, the first investment makes it hard to abandon the investment midway.
When a project receives private funding, there is a faster turnaround. A lot of private organizations have a predetermined set of reviews of proposals and awarding approaches. Making awards may be faster because there are fewer review levels. Thus, there is likely to be a smaller set of regulations compared to the federal level processing. It may span from the length and the elasticity of cost to a programmed system of reporting outcomes. A team will be set up to manage grants used to produce reports measuring the level of success as it increases. As our organization is small, policies, procedures, and questions will rarely be supported. There will be a little allowance for site visits, contact a personal level. Indeed, the interest areas may change more frequently, making funding difficult to estimate.
Staffing
There is a feeling that employees in the public service cannot work as hard as those who have been in the private sector. There is also a feeling that public employees have no sense of obligation to the bottom line. If such a claim was true, it is undergoing a metamorphosis. Some giant organizations tend to prefer promoting staff from within the organization. Therefore, if one is to join such an organization, they must start from the lower cadre and climb up. An organization that embraces such practice believes that by doing so, they guarantee career progression for their members. Others prefer to do so to preserve their corporate culture. They argue that for one to internalize the corporate culture, one must work their way up. It has also become common for some private organization to enlist the services of professional firms to recruit and hire for them. The recruitment agencies test the applicants until they come up with the best possible employees.
This arrangement will not be like short term contracting in which investments are short term and the risks lumped to one side. It involves ling term investments in which risks are shared by both parties. The arrangement leads to a mutual commitment that gives rise to success. The return on what has been invested is realized with time, depending on the level of efficiency. Consequently, it is hard for either of the partners to abandon the project and breach the agreement. The private partner is to be paid following guidelines that peg such payments after completion of certain milestones. The partner will be accountable for the quality standards of the project. The risk for construction delays, poor staff maintenance, cost overruns, and ineffective care that does not meet the terms will be transferred to the private partner by the government. On its part, the government will retain the service payment risk and making sure that there is access to quality service by the population served.
The hiring of employees in the private sector happens through a range of channels. It could be through various business owners, private agencies, and corporations. The private sector ventures in a broad range of businesses, including newspapers, law, financial services, and aviation, among others. The staffing in the current project will be conducted by a private agency. The agency will recruit and test the employees.
Training and Scheduling
Both sectors embrace personnel training. Training is invaluable because it is what enables the staff to internalize company procedures, goals, and priorities. It helps to keep an organization ahead of the pack. Raining helps staff adapt to change with ease. When there is a development path in perspective, employees tend to internalize and execute company policy with greater zeal. Training helps companies to retain their employees for longer because it is a channel through which employees see growth.
The flip side of employee training is that there are costs involved. Resources are used up in large amounts and fast because training is a continuous process. Training entails a host of costs, including paying the trainers and providing allowances for the trainees. When the training hours are extended, the staff may also become stressed, hence affecting their output at their work stations. Also, some training programs are theoretical and thus seem to lose touch with the practical aspects on the ground. Lectures of the latter type often lead to boredom.
Additionally, managing training programs for public healthcare organizations can be complicated because they rely on funding from the government. Government funding can be long coming and frustrating because of the many approval stages and processes. So, in the current scenario, funding for training of employees can be difficult as it will be relying on funds from the government.
Management
To maximize the benefits of integrated partnerships, governments must manage their risks. There is still limited experience in integrated partnerships in the health sector. Thus, it will call for more applications to collect evidence on the projects where they have succeeded, how they should be designed, and other details necessary for success. While some similar arrangements of integrated partnerships have flopped, there is also limited evaluation regarding the same. For this project, there will be new roles that the government may not be familiar with. The ministry of health will not provide healthcare directly. They will regulate the private entity in the provision of the same instead. They will be managers in the partnership and buyers of the infrastructure and service provided. To ensure success, sufficient financial and workforce resources must be pumped into the project.
 The capability of the private and public sectors to develop a partnership arrangement that can evolve with the changes that are bound to arise from the multilayer relationship is the main determinant of the project's success. In the current arrangement of clinical service delivery, it means that there must be an agreement at the outset on what risks will be carried by who. The benefits that will accrue from the project must also be allotted with care. A partnership is more like a marriage in which trust is a mandatory ingredient. Employing such tools as open book accounting, multilateral agreements, joint risk management teams, shared governance, and expert resources will enrich the realization of the partnership goals. It is critical to invest in planning and expert resources. An early and thorough assessment will provide an impetus and guideline towards realizing the goals of the health policy. It, at the same time, relieves the government of the risk of excess capacity or outdated models of delivery.
Conclusion
In modern-day, nothing works better than public-private partnerships in delivering important development projects to the community. The approach is great with estate development, infrastructure construction, monetizing non-performing public assets, for the benefit of the public, and redevelopment initiatives. The partnerships utilize the experience and expertise of the private sector, including the financial resources, to achieve goals for the public sector. PPPs are complex, though. Thus, different communities and stakeholders approach them with varying concerns and viewpoints. The private sector views the public sector as limited in its understanding of the core drivers of progress, such as the overheads. The public sector, on its part, thinks that the private sector is too preoccupied with profit-making that it loses the bigger picture of the importance of service, and their perspective interferes with sincere deal-making. While the private sector does not understand that municipalities do not make profits, the public sector loses the point that developers must be paid for them to take risks and work. The goals of the public sector, therefore, go beyond profits. The private sector has a firm focus on economic viability, which may lose some pertinent elements of true progress.
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