Productivity Why Is High Productivity

Productivity

Why is high productivity essential in health care organizations?

Unlike some industries which have busy seasons and slow seasons, healthcare is constantly subject to the demand for high levels of productivity all year 'round. This is due to the omnipresence of illness -- and also the need for wellness promotion. Healthcare organizations must constantly provide optimal care, despite increasingly scarce financial and human resources. Although the need for health insurance reform and a shortage of nurses can cause organizational strain, healthcare organizations must provide the same levels of care for all patients, regardless of macro external factors.

Describe areas that could increase employee productivity.

What motivates employees to 'be productive' is a controversial issue in organizational literature. One obvious motivational technique is that of payment, and to draw qualified nurses to address the current nursing shortage many organizations offer bonuses for entering nurses and attractive benefits packages. Attractive working hours and shifts may also draw employees to become a member of an organization, although this can be difficult to orchestrate, given the demands of the healthcare field for employees to work long and often eccentric (late night 'graveyard' or early morning) shifts.

However, in addition to these external motivating factors, there are also internal motivating factors that must be addressed. While external motivators may draw an individual to an organization (and few people are willing to work without pay), it is internal motivators that boost an employee's spirit and continue to make them feel involved with and committed to the organization. These motivating factors include making the employee believe as if his or her employer truly 'cares.'

Ways to boost employee productivity and to make employees feel invested in the organization include soliciting information from work when enacting changes, using employee feedback to shape the direction of how work is managed and allocated in a participatory rather than a hierarchical manner, and attempting to minimize the red tape and negative influences that can impact care (Huber 2000: 42). Worker burnout in the healthcare field is high, due to the stresses of the job. Allowing nurses to take breaks, offering nurses and other healthcare workers counseling and opportunities to talk about their work, and creating a sense of community solidarity through meetings and discussions are all ways to relieve pressure and hopefully generate new ideas to improve organizational productivity. Effective leadership combined with involved participation from followers is necessary to maximize productivity (Huber 2000: 11)

How can you calculate productivity and list the factors that must be considered.

The oldest method of measuring nursing productivity is hours spent upon a patient per day (Huber 2000: 703). However, in the modern era, a variety of productivity measures have been employed to assess employee productivity and efficacy. Patient improvement or outcomes measurement is sometimes deployed, although this is obviously an imperfect measure, given that many factors can impact patient success rate. Measuring improvement against overall (national) general benchmarks of patient improvement for similar ailments is occasionally used. But this does not take into consideration other environmental factors within the hospital besides nursing care, and demographic factors that could impact patient improvement (Huber 2000: 704). Other measures might include patient return rates (given that rapid return visits can indicate improper care during the first visit) and ER wait time but even these are far from 'foolproof.'

One valuable indicator has been to assess patient outcomes in relation to numbers of nurses on staff. Given that there often is a dramatic improvement in patient outcomes when nurses per patient are increased, this provides some clue as to how to demonstrably improve patient health, if increasing staff members is feasible (Huber 2000: 702-703).

Describe the two models for productivity: cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit models.

Cost effectiveness models (CEA) measure productivity based upon optimization of financial resources. The health benefit of a particular treatment or procedure is calculated in terms of health units, and the cost outcome is measured in dollars (Huber 2000: 346). The purpose of CEA modeling is to provide an objective, data-driven and empirical method for assessing organizational choices. Cost-effectiveness models encourage caregivers to maximize patient health while minimizing the costs of treatment. The focus is on finding the optimal balance between improving patient care and containing costs.