Managing human resources in organizations

Managing Human Resources

In order to complete this evaluation and to determine the degree to which the human resource helps in addressing the hospital's mission and objectives, one should first start with a brief enumeration of these. The hospital proposes to offer the best possible services to its patients, which means that many of the objectives of the human resource department are directed towards this mission. These include recruiting and retaining the very best employees that the organization can afford and creating a proper environment for the employees' success and their development in time. Among other operational goals, the hospital proposes to maximize employee retention and develop training programs that will help in the evolution of the human resource.

The analysis will show that the organization has only partially fulfilled its objectives on the human resource side. Some of the worrying aspects include the fact that employees seem to commit grave errors, which could translate into legal actions against the hospital, following the loss of patients' lives. The annual evaluations of the personnel (which seem to have stopped now) have revealed that several of the employees are not developing in any way, with average performances throughout most of the analyzed period of time. Furthermore, these employees are still part of the staff, which may mean that the efficiency of the team can be discussed.

On the other hand, there are good news in terms of the way information technology is used, as well as in terms of the coordination between the various parts of the organizational structure, which seems to be properly setup so as to encourage communication between the different departments, as well as top-down coordination.

SWOT

With this in mind, a SWOT analysis of the hospital's human resource is likely to show the following facts:

Strengths. The biggest strength of the organization, from a human resource management perspective, is the IT system that has been implemented. The reason for this is that the IT system allows a proper communication and facilitates the coordination both horizontally, between different departments, and vertically, between the hospital's leadership and the employees. At the same time, the network system allows an efficient access to the patients in the hospital.

Another important strength is the way that the IT network has made an impact on the organizational structure of the hospital, which also stimulates an efficient working relationship between the employees. The employee turnover seems to be low, if one looks at the timeframe when the evaluations were done and the time when some of the incidents have occurred. This would be a relevant base to build on team spirit and team work.

At the same time, it is important to note that the hospital rigorously implements several norms and regulations, including the HIPAA, DICOM or PACS standards. This facilitates the activity of the personnel, as they can follow a simpler set of instructions in their work and activity. It also helps that the hospital would not need to embark on a complicated and likely lengthy process of implementing these and one can assume that the employees are also familiar with these standards (knowing that training them to use the standard would imply an additional cost).

Weaknesses. Some of the evaluations show that (1) some of the employees are not prepared for the job they have to perform and (2) they have still been retained in their positions despite some severe mishaps during their tenure. One such example is that of Bennie Bellamy, whose first general evaluation revealed that he does not follow through on assignments, including critical assignments such as checking vitals (the follow-up corrective action form shows that he has not done so on several occasions). This issue goes beyond ensuring that the hospital offers the best quality services and more into the possibility of putting the patient's life at risk. Such an employee should have been let go the moment that something like this occurred.

Looking through some of the incident report forms, it seems that several people on staff made severe mistakes, which sometimes resulted in the death of patients. Joan Hudspeth had three such incidents, one resulting in the patient's death and all being a consequence of her mistakes, including switching treatments and giving hydromorphone instead of morphine. Any one of these should have led to the dismissal of the employee.

Another weakness that is also unsettling is the fact that some of the employees have not been able to grow or develop, as an expected result of training and development programs (which is one of the key objectives of the organization). It is difficult to understand how an employee can score 2 (average) in the evaluations for several years in a row, as well as why such an employee is still a member of the staff.

Finally, there seems to be a significant gap in yearly evaluations, usually most of these end around 2005, even if the employees are still active in the system and different incidents have occurred in subsequent years.

Opportunities. Building on the strength of the organization, the opportunity is to integrate the IT system more into the development and training of the workforce. This would potentially mean that training programs could be more efficient, but also that the monitoring of the human resources and their assessment would also be properly undertaken and stored. Other opportunities include specialization: a part of the group of employees could be train to specialize in particular services, which would make the hospital more competitive on the market.