HR management challenge - Essay Example

The funds required for the operation of the hospital is obtained from the property taxes on the residents of Dallas. The hospital experiences a huge volume of patients on a regular basis. The hospital beds are laid in the wide hallways. The renovation of the hospital has been proposed by the Dallas County Commissioner’s court by replacement of the old infrastructure with a new 17 storied building in order to provide quality healthcare service that also takes care of patient safety. Real world healthcare human resource management challenge Recently Parkland Memorial Hospital has shown the doors to many of its employees.

This has resulted in huge vacancy in the nursing department, which is three times higher than it was a year ago, as per the official figure. More than 400 workers which included registered nurses have left the hospital between November and mid-March. The figure is around 30 per cent more than what was expected. Jim Johnson the new human resource director of the hospital has acknowledged that there is more stress than it had been in the past. Almost all of the workers have left voluntarily, though 101 of them were fired after giving reasons for the same.

The reasons which can be stated are tiredness, showing rude behavior to the patients, stealing and unexcused absences. Some of the employees who are underperforming are being made to undergo training to improve their skill. But the problem they are facing is that these employees are choosing to leave voluntarily. The hospital can’t keep the patients happy without keeping the workers happy. They have to motivate the staff. The main problem is the availability of nurses who can leave easily any hospital as they can get a job anywhere.

But the main reason of them leaving is that there is an extraordinary amount of workload. To prevent this management have communicated to give retention bonuses to the nurses (JACOBSON, 2012). What has happened thus far and description of the challenge Dr. Thomas Royer who is the interim chief executive officer, have acknowledged that the hospital managers are walking a fine line and taking steps to make necessary changes. They have to put pressure on the employees to improve their performance but at the same time cannot pressurize too much on the employees which will force them to leave the hospital.

A registered nurse, who left Parkland, told she was driven by low morale as the rank-and-file workers were blamed for what was wrong in the hospital. They were all treated as incompetent. They were criticized even for the right things they were doing. The employees believed that the main reason the problem was created was due to middle level management. None of the middle level managers were fired. All the blames were put on the employees itself. They left Parkland because they knew what was wrong and nothing was being done to correct it.

They felt that the senior level management was not concerned about their issues. Johnson said though the management tried to do their part to help them but it had the opposite effect on the employees. For example if a patient party reported any complaint to the managers regarding employee error which requires a corrective action the employee would feel demoralize by the action taken by them. Morale sunk so low in recent months that the hospital’s pastoral care staff had to begin counseling the employees, not just the patients.

The hospital was also struggling to attract new candidates. The present scenario is also affecting their