This week in class we had a guest speaker who is the Vice President of Human Resources at one of the major hospitals in New Hampshire. He has a lot of important things to say about the role that human resources plays in a hospital and why they are so crucial to the functioning of the organization. Human resources is extremely important in any industry because it deals with people and as long as there are people working in an organization, there will be a need for human resources. In health care especially, it is important to have that department to help guide employees who may have not had a lot of experience in leadership training and develop them into better leaders and coworkers.
Human resources also plays a critical role in the hiring of new employees. In healthcare especially, making sure new employees have the right credentials and education is extremely important. In our Health Law class, we talked about a case involving a man who had never graduated medical school but had still ended up practicing medicine because he scammed the hiring department of the hospitals he worked at. Cases like these show how important it is to have a human resources department to follow through on verifying the credentials of potential candidates. Human resources also provides a lot of support in dealing with conflicts in the work place. Like I said before, as long as your organization has people working in it, conflict is going to occur at some point and it is important to have a resource to go to when that happens. As a hospital manager, acknowledging the need for human resources and having an understanding of exactly what they do will help you in creating a successful organization.
Another important aspect of HR to consider: recruiting. In healthcare, generally speaking the demand for qualified workers exceeds the supply, especially in nursing. Imagine yourself as head of HR one day. What will you do to market your organization to make it the most visible and most appealing to prospective employees? How will those specific costs be justified against other competing funding needs within the organization's overall budget? Once you've successfully recruited, say, several new graduate RNs from a local school, how will you now keep them at your organization for the long term? Usually the cost of keeping happy and satisfied employees on board is less than the cost of constant turnover, never-ending recruiting, and recurring onboarding.
ReplyDeleteIt's a much more interesting field than it sounds like from the outside. But you know that having spent some time with another HR professional!
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point about offering leadership training, and it is definitely an asset to organizations. The hospital where I work has quite a robust leadership training program, as well as many other classes that employees can sign up for free of charge, as long as their manager approves that they can miss part of the work day for them. I feel fortunate that I've been able to attend many of these training classes which were not something that was offered at the last place I worked.
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