Attracting and Retaining Staff in Public Healthcare: Challenges and Strategies

Essay: Attracting and retaining staff
STUDENT NAME
INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATION(S)

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Essay: Attracting and retaining staff
Human resource management (HRM) is mainly concerned with development of
organisation’s as well as individuals working for the organisation. It not only engages
developing and securing of workforce talent but also in implementing programs that can
enhance cooperation and communication between individual workers to nurture
organisational development. Responsibilities undertaken by HRM of organisation’s includes
training, appraisal, recruitment, selection, utilisation of workforce, implementation of rewards
and pay systems, etc. When examining public health care system in global context, various
issues regarding human resources management and questions arise. Among them, few issues
will be discussed further in this essay including workforce training and development,
diversity and work-life balance, employment relationship, performance management along
with selection and recruitment of healthcare workforce. While going through the articles in
general, it was found that challenges in attraction and retention of workforce in every country
seemed prominent, however, health care organisations seemed to have additional challenges
as compared to the others.
According to Knies, et al. (2015), composition and size of workforce is of great
concern in public sectors. This study has been further supported by Tarsunbayeva, et al.
(2017) where the authors state that workforce training and development is an important issue
that demands giving critical attention to health care workforce composition in terms of skill
and training programs. Performance management of health care workforce is an issue that
generally arise at the time of global health care examination. In literature, it has been
suggested that movement in human resource workforce closely follows performance
management considering every individual especially in the internal workplaces within every

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country (Cogin, Ng, & Lee, 2016). Moreover, mobility and migration issues further demand
workforce planning and giving attention to those issues that considers rewards and pay to
improve overall performance of workforce. Nowadays, organisations do not hesitate in
providing employees with additional incentives like housing, infrastructure, bonuses, etc. to
retain qualified workforce and for enabling job rotation. However, Manimaran & Kumar
(2016) argues that public healthcare workforce in developing countries remain underpaid and
thus shows poorly motivation and dissatisfaction.
According to Kramar, et al. (2014), “HR recruitment is defined as any practice or
activity carried on by the organisation with the primary purpose of identifying and attracting
potential employee” (p.244). It can also be said that recruitment and selection have many
implications for individuals as well as organisations. According to the authors, even after the
global economic recession recognised during 2008-09, many organisations still faces issues
in upholding skilled labour and find difficulties in retaining and attracting key talent. In
HRM, recruitment activities are implemented to design and mark the number of individuals
who apply for any vacancy, type of individuals who apply for job role and/or likelihood that
applied individuals will be accepted for the applied post according to the vacancy. In other
words, organisational recruitment and selection goal is to make sure that organisation have
reasonable amount of qualified applicant who finds the job acceptable and can be chosen for
any vacant position. HRM, when relating to public healthcare, can be well-defined as
diversified clinical and non-clinical individuals responsible for public and personal health
intervention.
The most significant health care system inputs are based upon performances and
benefits the system can deliver through skilled, knowledgeable and motivated workforce.
HRM is a about cohesive use of policies, system and management practice to develop,
maintain, retain and recruit employees for strengthening organisational capacity in meeting

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desired objectives. HRM also deals with firing and hiring workforce, development and
payroll where it plans and implement effective process and frameworks for people
management in the organisation like recruitment, job placement, planning and engagement.
According to Podger (2017), HRM emphasizes that individuals remain critical in achieving
sustainable competitive advantage and for that they integrate human practices with firm’s
corporate strategies which helps human resource specialists to control workforce and provide
efficiency and equity goals. However, in most of the organisation’s the role of HRM is
misunderstood and utilised inefficiently, especially in today’s public healthcare systems.
Mbemba, et al. (2016) suggests some effective strategies that can retain, recruit and
select workforce for countries who faces issues regarding HRM in their healthcare
organisation. According to the authors, training can support rural as well as developing
countries workforce background and desire to work more effectively. Though, before
commencing training of recruited staff, selecting is a critical stage where the role of HRM
proves very significant as selection involves many critical judgements and taking
responsibilities like selecting workforce that are suitable for the vacant position along with
placing appropriate staff at appropriate place. Kramar, et al. (2014) examined five critical
standards in which employee selection can be made effectively that includes ‘reliability,
validity, generalisability, utility and legality’. The authors also mention about different
selection modes for related five standards that can be utilised by the organisations depending
upon the nature of work and job responsibility. Although the authors mentioned testing
individual capability, but they also argued that no single test can fulfil requirement for all
kinds of job. Indeed, HRM can use many forms of tests for particular time period to gain
knowledge about applicants and their necessity for the vacant position.
Workplace have become prime discussion topic for debate regarding making
improvement within oneself and for the team members. Learning and development are key