When it comes to healthcare HR, the most important task that has to be carried out daily is to always remember the “Human” half of the job title. Health care – more than any other service – depends on human interaction, through giving and receiving. In the transaction between the patient and the provider of healthcare, the greatest part of the deal falls on compassion and comfort, perhaps just as importantly as it depends on guidelines and medical protocol. That is why to commit yourself to a job in healthcare, HR does not only require the usual communication, organizational and developmental skills, but it is also truly a challenge of one’s flexibility and ability to mitigate stress and tension.
It wasn’t until recently that the healthcare industry of the Middle East in general, has sobered up to the immensity of the service it needs to provide and to the incessant need to raise the standard on which the entire healthcare system operates. That change remains an ongoing process, in which HR has emerged to play a most vital role especially in recruitment and ensuring the quality of the service provided to the patients.
It is true that the emergence of HR in hospitals is a recent and exciting endeavor for both the administrators and the healthcare providers alike. And let me start by saying that I find, as a healthcare provider, that the rise of HR and the increasing acknowledgement of its importance in healthcare facilities, at least in the private sector, is a sign of progress.
However, navigating through those uncharted waters has not been a picnic all the time and the newfound dynamic is not without problems, the most significant of which, in my opinion, is a sort of dissociation in expertise between healthcare staff and HR members.
Through my experience as a young healthcare practitioner who often finds herself jumping from one interview to the next, and through actual engagement in a clinical work environment, I would say that this gap in understanding of medical protocols and the importance of certain treatment modalities between recruiters and candidates has been the most challenging part of the situation. It often feels that I am speaking a completely different language than the person on the other end of the table, being asked all kinds of misguided questions or focusing on parts of the practice that are clinically less important. A problem as such can be understandable, nonetheless detestable, given the corporate training of most HR recruiters and how it differs greatly from the medically-allied professions.
This could be remedied simply by familiarizing HR teams in hospitals with the healthcare industry beforehand, while also paying the usual attention to qualifications and job requirements.
It is quite often that the role of HR in hospitals forms the gateway between the priorities of the corporate administration, including all that has to do with cost-efficiency, competitiveness and so forth, and those of the healthcare practitioners with all the diversity in their specialties, qualifications and often methodology.
In my opinion, finding the balance between those two workplace ideologies that are, at worst, always in tension with one another, and at best on a fine thread of harmony, is the Herculean task that healthcare HR in our Middle Eastern countries have to juggle. This is especially since the main concern of establishments in the medical field right now is to recruit and retain employees who can rise to the new standards of care offered to the patients, and to ensure a competitive level in the growing demanding demographic of healthcare service consumers.
In our developing countries, where guidelines for practice are less defined and not yet solidified, and gray areas still take a wide portion of the spectrum of caretaker/patient interactions, more often than not, the HR team will possibly find itself in a situation in which they have to offer understanding to a wide array of arising conflicts that might put them at odds with the clinical field and its highly-stressful environment. It is often up to them to find the best ways to navigate policies in a way to ensure the least amount of hostility possible, and that is a mission that needs resilience and good judgment based on experience, specialization and familiarity with the details of the industry.
To conclude, the healthcare industry has been and must always be focused on the patients and the quality of the service that’s being offered to them. The role of HR coming into view in hospitals must ultimately have the same focus through its continuing accumulation of industry expertise, development of definitive guidelines and much needed efforts of bridging the gaps between different policies and all-encompassing mentalities that exist in the medical workplace.
Dr. Salma A. Nazeem
Design: Basem Hassan
EDITORS: Mennat-Allah Yasser Zohny & Nada Adel Sobhi