Unit 13 Managing Human Resources in HSC Assignment Solution

Program	Diploma in Health and Social Care
Unit Number and Title	Unit 13 Managing Human Resources
QFC Level	Level 4

Introduction

This Managing human resources in HSC assignment is aimed at understanding the significant process of recruitment and selection of people in health and social care setting and to understand the way they can be effectively managed and engaged in continuous professional development. The significance of recruiting appropriate individuals and retaining by addressing their growth and development needs would be highlighted. Additionally, the impact of management and leadership style, organizational policies, regular practices and legislations on health care teams would be discussed. For achieving these aims of assignment Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust has been chosen.

                           

Task 1

Q1. Factors To Be Considered In Planning Recruitment Process In Health And Social Care Setting

Recruitment in health and social care setting is a process of finding, selecting and hiring the best qualified individual either from within the organization or outside for a vacant post in a time and cost effective manner. The chosen organization Central London Community Healthcare NHS  (CLCH NHS)trust is looking has a job opening for community staff nurse and in order to select and hire best possible candidate for this job, operationally and strategically, various factors need to be taken into consideration. Operational factors are the essential factors concerning employees such that they get work as per their qualifications and an opportunity to grow and develop professionally while the strategic factors are in interest of organization that makes sure that the best available and qualified individual is recruited to successfully achieve organizational goals (Brotherton & Parker, 2008).

CLCH NHS is the largest community health care provider in London and is delivering quality health care and support services to millions of people across the country with the mission of giving a better start to children and independence to adults (Central London Community Healthcare, 2016). The community staff nurse required by the organization need to deliver nursing care services in a holistic and person centered approach to the housebound patients and address their individual needs. The applicant should be a Registered nurse having NMC registration and should have experience to work with patients having complex needs. One should have abilities to work in the role of Community Nursing and abilities to make care plans as well.

Following the specifications of roles and qualifications, it would be required to decide between internal and external recruitment. In internal recruitment, an existing employees is being promoted or transferred to the vacant post by providing him required training through succession planning. This is a time and cost effective process. External recruitment is hiring a new candidate from outside the organization and is a time consuming and expensive process but brings new talent and experience. For the external recruitment, a job advertisement having details about job roles, qualifications, experience, location, duration and wages would be given in newspapers, website, recruitment agencies and health magazines.

Q2. Approaches To Ensure Selection Of Best Individual:

There are several approaches to select the best individual out of many applicants applying for the vacant community staff nurse post in the CLCH NHS trust. It has been suggested that by utilizing the appropriate mixture of these approaches, the most eligible and suitable candidate can be hired. These approaches can start from short listing candidate by following a fixed set of criteria or competencies, taking an online questionnaire test of shortlisted candidate, calling them for interviewing/personal meeting, using assessment tests and finally comparing and evaluating each candidate’s performance to choose the best one (Kuvaas, 2006) 

Interviewing: It is the most popular and widely used selection method that involves direct communication of the candidate with members of selecting committee. To ensure selection of most appropriate candidate, post and responsibilities related questions must be asked and any irrelevant questions must be avoided. As the community nurse would be required to work under District Nurse Team Lead, even he should be made part of the selection team. Further, opinions and feedbacks may be taken from clients to identify their needs and choosing the one who can fulfill these needs in a better way (Cambridge Training and Development, 2000).

Although, interviewing has a disadvantage that candidates may provide biased answers and their skills and behavior may be misleading but still it is considered as one of the best tools to analyze a person’s capabilities and attitude through his body language and conversation.

In addition to interview, other approaches like testing in assessment centre involving group discussions, role plays, IQ tests, etc may be used alone or with interviews to predict applicant’s behavior, attitude and knowledge. Finally, by thorough assessment and comparison, the candidate having skills, knowledge and capabilities closes to the job specifications is selected and hired.

Q3. Key Legislations and Policies to Ensure Selection of Right Individual:

Every country has its own laws, legislations and policies to protect the rights of its people. The selection and recruitment process is also regulated through a variety of laws and policies and HR manager should be well aware of these legislations to recruit people in a fair manner. CLCH is required to abide by following policies and legislations to ensure selection of right individual for community staff nurse post:

Equality Act, 2010: This act suggests that every person must be given an opportunity to apply and get a job irrespective of his disadvantaged status of being disabled, belonging to an ethical minority or a woman. People must not be discriminated on grounds like socio economic factor, their age, sex or their cultural background (Atwal & Caldwell, 2005).

Equal Pay Act, 1970: Every person has equal right to receive equal pay for similar kind of job irrespective of his gender, age, ethnicity, etc.  Thus, employer should always keep this in mind while offering salaries.

National Minimum Wage Act 1998: Employees must be provided salary in accordance with this act that suggests that a minimum of £9.40 per hour must be given to the workers.

Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act: For protecting vulnerable groups like children ,adults, disabled people, etc. from abuse or neglect, government has maintained a record of people accused of such behavior in past under a central list of offenders. HR department need to ensure that any candidate having his name in this list is not recruited to make sure that service users are well protected.

Data protection Act, 1998: To protect people’s right to privacy, the collected information of employees or applicants in recruitment procedure must be kept confidential. Further, any irrelevant personal and professional information must not be gathered by the organization.

In addition to these above mentioned legislations, the candidate having his name registered with NMC, having thorough knowledge of national health policies, ethical standards and is equipped with nursing skills principles of care, compassion, courage, communication, competence and commitment must be hired to protect the values and reputation of CLCH (Minett. and Wayne, 2009).

Task 2

Q4. Theories Explaining Individual Interaction in Health And Social Care Teams And Approaches For Developing Effective Teams:

To explain team development and people’s interaction, several theories and models have been suggested. One such popular model is given by Tuckman in 1965 suggesting five stages of evolution of team members as follows:

                       

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Forming: This is a set up stage where members behave formally and have confusion. Leader is required for advise.

Storming: This is a conflict stage where members face internal struggles and not consider them as a part of team.

Norming: This is a cohesion stage where a mutual support and friendship develops between members and they start considering each other’s view points as well.

Performing: This is an effectiveness stage where team turns to work effectively. Members develop trust, become interdependent and start working together for a common purpose.

Adjourning: It is the stage of suspension or dissolution where the team members exit as the purpose is fulfilled (Tuchman, 1996).

Tuckman has suggested that every team goes through these stages and interacts in this way; however, many authors argue that it is not necessary.
There are other theories like Bass and Ryterband’s model, Woodcock’s model, Homan’s model, etc to explain team development and interaction.
Health and social care team’s effectiveness is directly connected to the health outcomes of its service users. More efficient the teams are, better would be the quality of services delivered and better would be health level in the community, making it really important to make these teams effective. This can be achieved by:

• Making objectives clear to the members and setting agreed goals
• Having an open culture, members can freely say what they feel and do not bear grudges.
• Members supporting each other and have trust relationship
• Working together by cooperating and effectively manage all conflicts
• Involving everyone equally in the decision making process
• Effective leadership style that is in accordance with the situation
• Regularly reviewing team’s and every member’s progress and performance
• Providing opportunity to members to develop professionally (Jackson, et al. 2002)

Q5. Theories of Leadership Applying To HSC Workplace:

Leadership style can be broadly of two main types: autocratic leadership and democratic leadership. An autocratic leader is one considering himself as having all the authorities and has individual control over all major decisions. Such leaders make decisions as per their knowledge, predictions and capabilities and do not consider other any team member’s or other’s viewpoint (Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey, 2012).

On the other hand, democratic leadership is the style where the leader take other’s valuable opinion under consideration and make decisions in the interests of his team members. This is also called participative leadership and is the recommended style for health and social care workplace. In this style of leadership, every member is given equal right to keep their say, openly discuss everything and allows free flowing of ideas, thus, have the advantage of having motivated members, better decisions and better final outcomes. Since in health and social care settings, many a times, complex situations arise requiring essential decisions regarding patient’s treatment plan, care needs, etc. to be made, such leadership style is found to be most effective as the problem is viewed from multiple angles and a best possible solution can be reached (Price,2003).

Another leadership theory for HSC workplace is situational leadership. As per this theory, the most effective leadership style is where leader’s response and behavior towards members is totally situational based. Leader can be directive giving orders or supportive as per the maturity level of his members and complexity of situation.

Q6. Management of Health Care Working Teams:

Every team should be managed in such a way that allows its members to work with their full potential and take their maximum efforts to achieve the aspired team goals. Even in HSC, such teams are essential so as to ensure delivery of high quality safe and secure health and care facilities to the users and getting better community health outcomes (Adams & Bond, 2000). Following approaches can greatly assist in well management of HSC working teams:

• Allowing every team member to speak up freely and keep their view.
• Actively involving team members in decision making process.
• Managing them in a way that allows their continuous professional development
• Identifying individual needs and addressing them effectively
• Keeping them motivated through appraisals, recognitions and awards
• Providing them with monetary and other incentives on performing well
• Encouraging them through promotions and allowing them to lead mall tasks
• Keeping an open communication system where the employees can directly communicate with seniors, give their feedbacks or clear doubts (Benson &Dundis, S.2003).
• Keeping the employees updated by organizing regular training sessions for them
• Autocratic leadership, if followed, must be replaced with democratic/participative one.
• Identifying the reasons of job dissatisfaction, if any, among employees and working to overcome them

Q7. Evaluating Own Development Influenced By Management Approaches:

A management approach that actively involves its subordinates in the decision making process is the one having maximum space for personal and professional development. A person gets the best opportunity to learn by self experiencing things, making decisions as per his will and then comparing the final outcomes with his expectations. Thus, a workplace with an open and trustful environment allowing the employees to freely express their ideas and discuss things proves to be great benefit. Members should have the support of and confidence in their leader that if anything goes wrong, he is there to handle and mange everything. This assurance allows them to grow, do mistakes and learn from these mistakes (Buchan, 2000). Thus, I feel for my personal and professional development a democratic and situation based leadership and management approach would be most appropriate.

In addition, employees must be managed in the way that they get appraised and recognized for their good work and performance. When an person takes his full effort to complete an assigned task and get praised for that, he would stay motivated to take such efforts in future as well and would work to enhance his potential. On the contrary, if the efforts go unnoticed, employees get demotivated and stop taking extra efforts. They must be provided with awards, monetary incentives, job promotion, etc for their efforts and performance to keep them as well as other employees motivated to work with full potential. Finally, I feel a management approach that addresses a person’s growth and development needs through regular training and education session is also essential. It enhances job satisfaction and motivation level (Sullivan & Decker,2009) .

Conclusion

It can be concluded that recruitment and selection is an essential procedure of any organization including a health and safety setting and require consideration of various operational and strategic factors. Additionally, various legislations and policies must also be considered like equality act, etc in the recruitment process to protect the rights of people. It also become clear that effective team management is essential in HSC to deliver high quality services to clients along with having a participative and situational leadership style.

References

Adams, A., Bond, S. (2000) “Hospital nurses’ job satisfaction, individual and organizational characteristics.”Journal of Advanced Nursing,Vol. 32 (3) pp: 536–543.
Atwal, A., Caldwell, K. (2005) “Do all health and social care professionals interact equally: a study of interactions in multidisciplinary teams in the United Kingdom.”Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences,Vol. 19 (3) pp: 268–273.
Benson, S. G., Dundis, S. P. (2003) “Understanding and motivating health care employees: integrating Maslow's hierarchy of needs, training and technology.”Journal of Nursing Management,Vol. 11(5) pp: 315–320
Buchan, J. (2000) “Health sector reform and human resources: lessons from the United Kingdom”Health Policy and Planning.Vol. 15 (3) pp:319-325
Brotherton, G.and Parker, S. (2008). Your Foundation in Health and Social Care: A Guide for Foundation Degree Students. SAGE. ISBN 9781412920407.
Central London Community Healthcare (2016). Official website (online) Available at http://www.clch.nhs.uk/about-us.aspx. [Accessed on 26 November 2016]
Cambridge Training and Development (2000). Advanced Health and Social Care (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198328261.
Jackson D, Clare J and Mannix J, (2002) 'Who Would Want To Be A Nurse? Violence In The Workplace - A Factor In Recruitment And Retention' 10 Journal of Nursing Management
Kuvaas B, (2006)'Performance Appraisal Satisfaction And Employee Outcomes: Mediating And Moderating Roles Of Work Motivation' 17 The International Journal of Human Resource ManagementMinett, P. and Wayne, D. (2009). First Health and Social Care (1st ed.). Reflect Press Press. ISBN 9781906052171.