Managing HealthCare Professionals
Introduction
Health care is one of the most complicated fields and currently healthcare professionals are working in extremely tough environments. It is known that the industry in all over the world is vibrant and grown widely, connected with a number of different professional fields. While providing health care, the healthcare professionals are not enough. Due to a huge number of different processes and operations carried on at a time, there is a requirement of managing them with keen detail. Healthcare professionals are managed under the health policy and management. The responsibility of this team is related to the leadership, management as well as administration of the health systems and work schedules. There are a number of positive impacts on the healthcare departments when the healthcare professionals, their responsibilities, and their duties are handled properly. The main aim of the paper is to discuss the best ways to manage healthcare professionals, their benefits, and their effects on the cost, quality, and achievement of the goals.
Discussion
In America, Europe, and different other parts of the world, the lack of healthcare providers caused the hospitals and healthcare centers crowded. It caused great mismanagement of the core tasks and an uncomfortable environment for the patients as well as the working healthcare professionals. Managing the professionals was essential at that moment and from that time till today, there are separate departments that are managing the healthcare overall as well as the healthcare professionals and all the other tasks and scheduling. Today’s healthcare system is not just complex but it is completely different from the past (Buchbinder & Buchbinder, 2007). Healthcare service providers have to survive in their field and minimize the cost as much as possible. There is not much profit in the healthcare field if it would not be efficiently managed. There are some essential causes that healthcare professionals are required to be managed properly. With respect to the financial status of the institute, it is highly required that because of the lack of expert staff and expensive equipment, efficient service is required. For this purpose, the medical staff and other healthcare professionals are required to perform their duties efficiently. The management’s main aims are to reduce the cost and to provide good and quality service in less time.
The job description of a healthcare professional is known but sometimes in socially and culturally different institutes, the healthcare institutes are required to give the necessary training to the newly hired healthcare professionals to get familiar with the environment of the organization (Buchbinder & Buchbinder, 2007). These pieces of training are very proficiently carried out all over the world in many medical institutes. These training must also be managed properly so that there would be no factors left behind. The healthcare professionals are also explained about their schedules and other important things related to the facilities and equipment for good routines in performing the job.
In healthcare, there are several numbers of tasks which could be performed by a single individual because the healthcare professional is always ready for any kind of role as per required with respect to the situation. In larger healthcare providing systems, there is a requirement for a good staff but in smaller institutes, the requirement is reduced to a very less number of proficient individuals. In the first scenario, in hospitals, and large medical camps, one individual should be associated with only one job because the number of patients and attendants to be served is huge and to reduce the waiting time, it is required to divide the tasks. In these scenarios, the management of healthcare professionals is completely different with respect to smaller institutes, clinics, and hospitals. There would be less number of patients expected and the complexity of work could also be less comparatively. The professionals working should be managed in a way that they would be able to multitask as well. Most of Healthcare managers have explained that due to the lack of understanding of the job description at the time of working, clashes occur and because of which, routine work is completely disturbed.
Most of the people associated with the management of healthcare professionals have given interviews on the importance of the job of management in healthcare. It is explained that healthcare professionals are duty oriented and they don’t even have time to think about themselves. They need complete mental and physical rest for their job and frequent overtime mostly gives a negative impact to them (Buchbinder & Buchbinder, 2007). The healthcare managers are responsible for the job completion with the perfection and satisfaction of everyone. For this purpose, the individual performing the duties should be managed properly. His breaks, start of the shift, end of the shift, salaries, bonuses, overtime payments, vacations, equipment for duty performance, and resolving of issues on time should be managed properly so that there would be no inconvenience for the healthcare professionals in the completion of their tasks. All the above-mentioned things would if managed properly, the satisfaction level increases of the healthcare professionals and they try to serve for as long as possible in the present institute.
All over the world, there are outnumbered medical institutes performing their duties with the perfectly managed healthcare system and professionals as well. In the healthcare institute, there are three main assets due to which the healthcare facilities are provided. If a single one is missing, the main process will not be continued properly. The first one is the building. For a healthcare system, a properly and well-designed building is required in which all the facilities of healthcare as well as supporting departments processes would be carried out. The second one is the equipment. Healthcare is an expensive field. For carrying out the processes, a well-equipped system is required. Without this equipment, most health facilities would be completely absent in the current modern world. The third and the most important is the staff in which doctors, nurses, midwifery professionals, dentists, pharmacists, and many other people collectively perform their duties to provide the care facility to a single patient.
Due to the lack of healthcare professionals all over the world, the healthcare service providing associations have to take care of their healthcare professionals because a healthcare professional is always well trained and can secure a job in any institute easily but a well-experienced person’s seat in the institute could remain empty for a long period of time because there is possibly very less number of people available on the hiring list for the specific job. The management could be replaced if not working properly and would be relocated or rebuilt if there are flaws and problems but healthcare professionals are not. In the United States already a huge number of well-experienced healthcare professionals are required because of a higher increase in the disease and aging community. Most of the people relocated to Canada, Europe, and Arab countries as they found better opportunities for learning and growth which caused a great depression currently in the United States. Management of the healthcare professionals also requires a contract associated with the experienced, senior, and quality staff. This contract will help the institute to always complete in respect of the staff.
Cost is one of the main factors which must be reduced while carrying out daily basis tasks. One of the main problems with the healthcare institutes which they are currently facing with respect to the management is that the overall system is very costly and the profit is not increased with respect to the other businesses. For the reduction of the costs, it would be highly required to manage the staff properly. In any healthcare institute, it is essential that doctors, nurse, and medical assistants should perform their duties efficiently and complete their tasks according to their job description. Sometimes when the doctor is available, the functional procedures should not be done by the nurse and sometimes when the nurse is available, only the sophisticated work would be done by the doctor. Since the doctor is expensive so in less time he should work on a greater number of patients. Also, a senior nurse is also allowed in big hospitals for doing some doctor’s duties in the unavailability of the doctors.
Healthcare institutes should have a proper system to be maintained so that the insurance and legal factors could be handled properly. The doctors should be tracked out of their misconduct in providing the wrong prescriptions and insurance claims. In the privacy practices, the accounts should be maintained by a separate department which would be responsible for collecting the admission, medicine, doctor’s appointment, and other charges including the electricity bills and equipment repair, and outsourced tasks. Healthcare professionals should be kept away from all these activities so that they would be able to properly work on their tasks rather than handling the manipulations and managing the patients. In small clinics in rural areas, the doctors, nurses, or the medical staff personally handle these issues which result in their unavailability for handling the patients properly as well as a problem in composing the lack of emotional bonding with the patients because the healthcare professionals have to make an emotional bond with the patient. For handling these issues, claim analysts, fraud examiners, corporate counsel and legal advisors should be hired by the management.
In many scenarios, because of irresponsibility, lack of communication, mismanagement, or misunderstanding, some disasters could be carried out which would result in the decreased quality of the facilities or death in severe cases. This kind of case happens mostly in the I.C.U, Emergency, OPDs, and Operation theaters. The main reasons are not always the doctors, medical assistants, and nurses but many other factors. Medical professionals are always kept out of these situations at that moment so that the other flows could not be disturbed or ruined. It is now the responsibility of the management to diagnose the issue and to understand the situation properly through interviews and discussions after the incident. This helps for the improvement of the quality of the service and removes the situations where ambiguity happened so that there would be no such situation happened in the future. In serious situations, hospitals need someone to explain to the media and the common public.
The Metropolitan State University of Denver has published a record that from 2010 to 2020, the number of jobs in healthcare management increased in all over the world to produce quality service. In a discussion of the management of healthcare professionals with respect to the teams, it can be explained that management is highly helpful among the medical professionals to empower the team members to work properly in the teams. The doctor is only responsible for making plans for treating a patient, the rest of the work is carried out by nurses, surgeons, and the related roles. Interpersonal collaboration should be built to properly create, analyze, and execute a plan. The management here is required for the properly organized flow of processes so that everything would be carried out well on time without any delay.
Managed healthcare professionals are also very good at communicating with everyone associated with the process. The medical staff is very good at communication but sometimes communication gaps are observed by the patients and a number of complaints are observed in the recent era from almost every institute. This gap causes disturbance for the patients and delays in the medical processes. Well-managed and maintained staff, as well as healthcare professionals, helps in reducing communication gaps. The collaboration is highly increased which causes interaction among healthcare professionals of all levels. They sit together, share difficult patients take advice from each other, help growing newbies, and maintain the continuity of the health care with a proper environment. The managed healthcare teams are very good in all this with respect to the unmanaged and unsupervised teams. They would be seen in conflicts and unnecessary personal quarrels.
Healthcare is a complicated subject in which a single person could not be successful in entertaining a patient. There are radiologists, physicians, nurses, medical assistants, surgeons, and helpers who are responsible for understanding a case completely and discussing the condition of the patient with respect to their expertise and past experiences. Everyone is holding a single piece of the puzzle and they have to sit together for a proper installation of those puzzle pieces to solve a case. The managed healthcare professionals usually and on regular basis sits together and get a better understanding of the patient’s cases. The unmanaged teams lack of understanding as they were not able to build familiarity with the other members which causes them to become introverted and unable to speak in front of the teams. This causes a severe negative impact on the performance of all over the team which results in wrong diagnoses and patient care problems. If a patient is misdiagnosed or not understood on the first attempt, he would have to be through all the processes again. It will be an increase in the cost of a single patient. Through good collaboration, the patients will be diagnosed properly on the first attempt efficiently. The patients and the institute are not the only ones who benefit from the managed healthcare professionals but also the professionals themselves.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, it can be concluded that healthcare professionals are needed to be managed properly which would be beneficial in many ways. As per explained above the overall cost estimated is less than comparatively the unmanaged professional workforce. The healthcare professionals, if properly managed, would be able to perform their core duties which include giving medical services to the patients, very proficiently. The distractions will also be reduced in which the payments, misdiagnosis, and recheck of the previous statements. Healthcare is a complicated subject and requires properly managed so that there would be no problems created. One of the most important factor because of which, healthcare professionals are managed is that because of the increase in the population and size of the institute, the healthcare professionals have a tough and stressful schedule which would cause mental and physical stress. For removing this stress and managing the schedules of the healthcare professionals, it is required that the management to properly maintain the schedules and to help the healthcare professionals with their routines.
References
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