Human resource management and performance in health care organisation- Essay

Human resource management and performance in health care organisation- the NHS - Essay Example There is a range of approaches to managing the healthcare workforce for high(er) performance. In the UK, two streams of activity are evident: the first focuses on making the NHS a ‘good employer’ thereby recruiting and retaining ‘good staff’, which could be called human resource (HR) management; the second approach concerns rethinking how to provide ‘high quality services’ as ‘efficiently’ as possible, which could be called ‘different ways of working’. Such approaches are often referred to as ‘modernisation’ (see Bach 2002). However, Seifert and Sibley’s argument that ‘modernisation’ is not a neutral step forward but a highly coloured version of progress rooted in market-style efficiency’ (2005: 226) indicates the contentious nature of such terminology. ‘Different ways of working’ is an attempt to avoid value judgements on the process and outcome of the different ways of working for employees, employers and service users. Given that the UK NHS is the third largest employer in the world, employing 1.3 million staff in 2004, it provides a useful case study to illustrate the processes, outcomes and questions raised by both streams of work. The paper begins by outlining characteristics of the healthcare workforce in the UK and the challenges raised for managers. Against this background, the paper reviews the rationales put forward for HR management and different ways of working, providing recent UK examples of both types of initiatives. We use the Changing Workforce Programme as an example to provide an illustration of some issues which should be of particular concern to managers endeavouring to get the best from their healthcare workforce. Healthcare organisations are characteristically made up of a large proportion (around 50%) of professionally qualified staff providing frontline services to recipients of healthcare. This type of organisational arrangement has been called a ‘professional