Skills Gapping Applied to Health Care Setting - Essay Example

The healthcare environment can benefit greatly from skills gapping, especially in areas of patient care in a hospital setting. Nurses and physicians, and much other support staff, are exposed to people of many different cultural, ethnic, or family backgrounds and each have different interpersonal dimensions and personalities.

Being able to provide quality face-to-face interaction with patients, at all staff levels, means being able to be adaptive to their unique cultural values. Skills gapping could recognize all areas which come in contact with patients, assess the goals of each job role, and then assess staff for their ability to provide multicultural support at the social level. Gaps in knowledge or experience in these areas would be located in the skills-gapping process, allowing for the health care analyst to review training programs related to multi-cultural relationships or enhancing patient psychology.

Patient care is much more than just the delivery of medicine, it is interactive at multiple staff levels and skills gapping can be a competitive edge. Offers one human resources expert, “Training and development plans should be regularly reviewed and certainly more than once per year” (Wilson and Western, 2001, p.93). It seems that many companies develop training programs and then continue to allow them to become standardized over time without upgrading or modernizing them.

This would provide ineffective training for the real-time healthcare environment. Skills gapping can act as a regular auditing tool within the business to improve training delivery and training program development which would be ongoing. For example, if a hospital administrator decided that it would become the organizational mission to provide more modernized technologies to improve patient care, a skills-gapping analysis could be conducted to identify whether existing physicians have the credentials or know-how to operate the equipment.