5 Ps of human resources

M S Venkatesh, Sr Director-HR, P D Hinduja Hospital & MRC explain the 5 essentials to excellent talent management within hospitals

Talent management in healthcare organisations revolves around one of the most important measures of success – Patient Care.

The 5 Ps of human resources management in a healthcare organisation that impact patient care are:

1. Performance: Hospitals have to focus on the efficient and effective management of cost, as the means to earn revenues are becoming challenging due to various factors such as consumer awareness through social media, spiraling inflation, push by the regulator and also the increasing cost of labour. Hence from a HR perspective, bed to men ratios are critical as much as automating processes to enhance service excellence and impact patient care scores. Therefore, some of the metrics like Average Length of Stay (ALOS), cost of materials, labour cost that impact overall hospital revenues and costs are critical to ensure a healthy surplus or profitability depending on the type of hospital whether trust run or otherwise.

2. Productivity: This is a very important parameter whether the labour employed is contractual or permanent. It is important that hospitals deploy adequate due diligence processes to ensure proper antecedent checks of labour being deployed as they are key to impact patient safety and care. Further, it is important to conduct periodic industrial engineering studies to evaluate optimal labour required based on the level of automation which is dynamic and other softer aspects like absenteeism and unionisation. The kind of ratios of Manager to Supervisor to Attendants need to be carefully deployed without adversely impacting service levels and ensure return on investment (ROI)

3. Processes: These are a key dimension of hospital performance, which needs to be continually monitored and improved with the level of increasing digitisation and demands of patient care and patient safety. The Process needs to address hygiene issues like car park facility, receiving patients & waiting time besides other routine key processes like Admission, discharge, critical care, diagnostics etc. The typical measures of process efficiency like lead-time, cost and quality of service shall form part of the Measurement index of a successful Hospital.

4. People: Talent within a hospital plays a very important role in delivering performance, productivity and processes and hence the selection of people becomes quite critical. The HR Manager will have to define success profiles of job positions and partner with functional managers and facilitate selection of the right people. It is important that functional managers make the final decision on the kind of people required for different job roles and take accountability for people selection.

5. Policy: Design and deployment of policy is the final P and may not be the last one, though it is an important parameter for enhancing people engagement that ultimately impacts Patient Care. Policy needs to be designed keeping in mind the longevity (dimension of time) of its application and the space (dimension of space) that it could cover defining the number of people that it would impact. Both these dimensions – Time & Space ultimately impact costs besides the level of people engagement. It is important that the HR Manager reviews the organisational policies continuously and proactively and use the tact of marketing it to influence the tough stakeholders like the clinical professionals, paramedics, nursing staff besides the promoters, CEO and the hospital administration staff. Hence, innovative communication of the policies becomes a very critical job of a human resource professional.