Human Resource Benefits
Quality healthcare is the most essential basic need of all human beings. Due to various expositions to manmade and natural harm, there ought to be a comprehensive healthcare scheme strategy for everybody to follow. In the case of employees, the healthcare scheme should be designed on the basis of method that takes into consideration the risks associated with their work. This is because some working ambience poses greater risks to workers than others, and thus it is upon the employer to come up with the best medical strategy that is in tune with employees’ working ambience.
Due to the dire need of quality healthcare by employees, several healthcare companies have been on the rise to cope up with this need. Since many are available, the task of the human resource management is to put in place a comprehensive strategy that will ensure that the ultimate health plan for its employees is a quality one. In the eye of an employer and through human resource department, this paper seeks to evaluate the quality of health care strategy to be provided for employees by health contractors.
How to Evaluate the Quality of Care Being Delivered by Health Benefits Contractor
The value of a prearranged healthcare to an organization’s employees is an essential knowledge, as it will enable them to evaluate the quality of services that are being given by contractors (Block, 2006). The organization stands to benefit if a quality health care scheme for its employees is in place. This is due to the fact that if workers are well or healthy enough, they have an excellent opportunity to work hard for the benefit of the company and their own.
In addition, if at any time a worker falls ill in the process, which is always inevitable no matter what measures are put in place, the quality health scheme would enabled the affected worker to recover quickly so as to resume his/her duties. In contrast, if the healthcare scheme provided by the contractors is not quality, the company risks to lose in terms of manpower hours and money. Also, some health related complications are likely to develop among the workers in place which may further damage the reputation and productivity of the company (Block, 2006). The best strategy to be put in place should then be best in quality and cost.
Outcomes Measurement Strategy
In order to get the benefits out of the best healthcare strategy, the strategy to be put in place should be based on a set standard. Therefore, the strategy should be termed as standard setting strategy or simply benchmarking strategy. Using the concept of benchmark as a strategy will involve comparative and analysis techniques. A benchmark is a standard that is universally accepted to be an outstanding reference whereby several derivatives can be analyzed from the same perspective. In using benchmark as the strategy, the company will have to evaluate health services provided by its contractors with the available high quality providing contractors being chosen. Benchmarking must start with problem identification (Ozcan, 2007).
In the case of the company concerning this problem, the human resources management has resorted to using benchmarking as the strategy and the problems identified for the company are cost, quality and accessibility. On the issue of cost, a chosen healthcare service company should be relatively cheap in terms of service provision. The issue of cost is very sensitive since if not well checked, it could harm the financial premises of the company. In addition, a very low cost will mean some suspicion in terms of quality since quality is directly proportional to the cost.
Consideration of the cost will entail so many factors. Since the cost will filter all the way to the employees’ pay, as well as the company’s contribution. The benchmark for the problem of cost will consider several factors. The initial factor is the premium to be paid by each employee; this should go hand in hand with the employees’ capacity to pay for the same, as well as the company’s ability to meet the same. The next factor in the area of cost is the maximum amount the employees are willing to give out per year and the subsequent percentage required by the health scheme. Moreover, the medical contractor considered should be able to meet the medical cases described since some companies are normally not in a position to meet some medical cases. For instance, the company may not be in a position to cater for some serious medical cases such as amputation.
The issue of accessibility is an important factor in the strategy of benchmarking. Majority of industrial accidents are unplanned. In fact, all medical cases are sudden and must be handled with due emergency. If the contractor handling the same is not in a position to handle the pressure with due urgency, the patient may develop further complications that may lead to further loss within the company (Nash & Goldfarb, 2006). The factor of quality is of a paramount importance as in this case, the contractor to be considered should guarantee quality. Although death is inevitable, this company understands it can arise from careless handling of such cases. Consequently, medical contractors have the obligation of guaranteeing quality for the clients.
After filtering out benchmark factors, the next step in the strategy is a thorough research on the organization’s employees. This is to be done so as to find some information such as the risks exposed to them and the amount they are able to afford. This will then be followed by designing the best structure for benchmarking. The benchmarking will then involve a research on the available medical contractors. The contractors will be evaluated based on the set factors and come up with the best choice.
The final outcome of the strategy to be drawn will result into a comprehensive system that has good structures in place with defined processes that are satisfactory to the company and the workers without compromising on anything. The strategy set will take some time to be implemented and the cost associated with it will involve research related costs such as travelling costs. The national medical service is the appropriate place where these contractors would be sorted out best on the benchmark set. After careful consideration, the final strategy should yield a system that has a summation of the functioning of the medical strategy in place as shown in the structure below:
Conclusion
The functionality of an organization is pegged on the health of employees. If the employees are accorded with quality health care, the company is going to function efficiently and reap the benefits of maximum person-hours from the employees. There are several strategies, which may be approached by human resource management, but the most appropriation in this case is benchmarking. Although it has some associated cost such as the cost of travels during the process of sampling out, the benefit associated will be immense.
References
Block, D. J. (2006). Health care outcomes management. Ontario: Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
Nash, D. & Goldfarb, N. (2006). The quality solution: the stakeholder’s guide to improving health care. Ontario: Jones &Bartlett Publishers.
Ozcan, A. (2007). Health care benchmarking and performance evaluation. New York, NY: Springer.