Management challenges of private healthcare managers in ethical decision-making

Name:Instructor’s name:Course:18 November 2016
Management Challenges of Private Healthcare Managers in Ethical Decision Making
1.1 Background
Many healthcare systems around the world are increasingly shifting their attention from just ordinary provision of health services to the proper management of the human resource available in the health sector. To be more precise, human resource is one of the three key inputs in the health system; the remaining two are consumables and physical capital. Regarding healthcare, one can define human resource as the many non-clinical and clinical staff required to provide both the individual and public health interventions (Gubler et al. 705). The performance and advantages that the health systems can provide widely depend on the knowledge, motivation, and the skills of the individuals that are tasked with delivering the health services. Just like it is important to provide the correct amount of the human and physical resources, it is important to ensure that there is a proper balance between various types of caregivers and health promoters.
Health care and human resource have quite a unique and complex relationship which desires more study than the ones that have been done in the past. Both the quantity and the amount of the healthcare consumables like disposable equipment, prostheses, and drugs are astronomically rising (Gubler et al. 710). This increase, in turn, makes the health care costs shoot up. If this phenomenon occurs in the public sector, it might result in a reduced capacity to hire and maintain competent health practitioners.

However, the private sector, just like the government, finds it crucial to develop an elaborate and capable team of human resource managers to ensure that the hired workforce is highly competent and able to work at full efficiency (Gubler et al. 715).
Several managerial issues come up when one assesses the healthcare sector in the global context. Size, distribution and composition of the workforce, degree of economic development of a country, and cultural and geographical factors are some of the most common issues that come up with the general management of human resource in the healthcare sector (Pitesa and Stefan 636). The variation in the size and composition of a country’s workforce is a matter of grave concern. For instance, the number of health practitioners available in a nation is a critical indicator of the ability of the country to provide effective interventions. The sociodemographic, cultural characteristics and economic characteristics are some of the factors that people consider when determining the health characteristics of a country.
The level of training of a country’s workforce is also another important element to consider when looking into the managerial issues of healthcare systems around the world. The managers of any health institution must consider the richness in the composition of the staff in terms of their level of training and experience in the various fields in which they work. The managers should ensure that they select their employees from able bodies that train their students on the various modern trends available in the healthcare sector. This kind of hiring ensures that the health sector has qualified staff to cater for both the present and the future needs of the country’s healthcare system (Pitesa and Stefan 643).
Migration of health care professionals is also another issue that needs to be addressed by the human resource managers in the health sector. Studies indicate that the migration patterns of the health practitioners follow the movement patterns of all the other professions; it is common for workers to prefer to migrate to urban areas and dessert the countryside (Pitesa and Stefan 652). The mobility of the workforce can create workforce imbalances that would need the managers to look into additional staff management issues like pay and extra rewards. On top of good salaries, developing nations use strategies like infrastructure, housing, and rotation of jobs to hire and retain health practitioners. This is the same technique that private health institutions use to recruit and retain government employees because most government health workers, especially in developing nations are underpaid and lack motivation (Pitesa and Stefan 658). This leads one to the next issue that comes up when evaluating the global health systems of a country; a country’s kevel of economic development. Several studies indicate that the more developed a country is, the more benefits the healthcare workers in that country have access to, and the more motivated they are. A more motivated workforce has obvious benefits in the health sector of a country; the workers will work hard to ensure that they deliver quality services to the residents of that country.
The nature of a country’s population is also another important element to consider when determining how to manage the health systems of a country. If a country has a high population of senior citizens, the country will definitely have a higher demand for qualified and specialized health services and facilities (Martin 24). As a result, both the private and public health institutions, as well as the insurance firms, need to craft policies and systems that suit this population. The system needs to be such that the systems provide quality healthcare to the old while still providing quality services to the minority population without making losses. Such challenging tasks require a decent and qualified team of managers in both the private and public health system. More training for young workers might also be necessary to fill the gap that the retiring population might leave. Other than these issues, it is also vital to consider the geographical and cultural aspects when assessing the global healthcare framework. Geographic elements like topography or climate have the ability to hinder or facilitate the delivery of health services. The political and cultural values of a people also influence the demand and supply of health practitioners and medical equipment. These are some of the numerous issues that need to be addressed if the healthcare system of the medical sector around the world is going to improve.
When assessing the reforms that need to be done to the health sector to ensure that these issues are sorted, one needs to explore the potential effects of human resource management in the reforms to the health sector. The particular healthcare reforms vary by nation; however, certain trends can be pin-pointed and followed up. These trends include issues like the quality, equity, and efficiency objectives. Many human resource interventions like outsourcing have been used to change “fixed labor expenditures to variable costs” as a way of improving the effectiveness of the services. However, making decisions on matters involving the health of individuals is a serious issue which requires a lot of morals and straight thought. This type of decision making is what people refer to as “ethical decision making” (Valentine 509). This kind of decision making is an ever advancing process that scholars keep researching and debating about, especially in the healthcare sector. Ethical decisions can quickly get complicated in the health industry for the people that manage the system (Valentine 520). The same factors that influence the management of human resource in the sector coupled with a few more unique ones affect the decisions that managers in the private healthcare sector make about patient care.
The present environment under which private medical institutions operate makes it necessary for the people in charge to make ethical decisions (Yu 573). The decisions they make are not only made towards the care of patients but also the operational and budgetary needs of the institution. As mentioned before, ethical decision making in the healthcare sector has become a major topic for research by international bodies like the World Health Organization (Yu 589). The leadership in the industry has changed their focus from the initial service oriented strategy to the current profit-oriented approach. Consequently, every manager in the health sector, whether in the private or public sector, needs to possess these skills (Schrempf, Guido, and Palazzo 59). As a result, many learning institutions have changed their syllabus to incorporate training on these new skill sets (Schrempf, Guido, and Palazzo 63). This paper talks about some of the biggest challenges that the private managers or leaders in the healthcare sector face while regarding ethical decision making.
1.2 Research Aim
This study intends to figure out some of the challenges that private managers in the health sector face while addressing matters that require ethical decision-making. While figuring that out, it also intends to determine whether the right and desired values are the ones that drive the focus in the private healthcare sector. Also, it is aimed at finding out what the present framework of the health industry and the available resources have to aid the managers to arrive at ethical decisions.
1.3 Specific Objectives
To find academic articles and books that talk about the topic.
To read and analyze these books with the aim of establishing the trends that have been advanced in the past.
To develop ways in which the past trends can be used to analyze the present trends and try to predict the future trends.
To come up with a reasonable threshold of what can be considered to be ethically correct and morally incorrect.
And eventually to determine how often managers in the private sector make ethical decisions as well as how often they do not.
1.4 Research Approach
The research will review at least ten articles that provide different arguments on the challenges that managers in the private health sector face while making ethical decisions. The writers of most of the articles that were reviewed believed that a majority of the challenges that the managers faced were based on the values and the levels of experience of the individual managers and not the values of the organizations in which they worked. The information used in this study also included information from non-clinical professionals but who relate or deal with the healthcare sector. In essence, the mode of research was qualitative research. Qualitative research is research that involves exploration. It helps one to gain insight into the issue he is investigating and come up with a hypothesis for a possible qualitative study (Lehnert, Yung-hwal, and Nitish 195). This kind of research is also used in uncovering the trends in people’s opinions and thoughts and delve deeper into the issue. The methods of collecting data vary in qualitative research; they could be semi-structured or fully structured. Some of the usual data collection methods include individual interviews, observation and group discussions (Lehnert, Yung-hwal, and Nitish 218). This research also included a taxonomy approach that considers numerous factors that influence decision making to analyze the reviewed pieces of literature. Concisely, most of the methods that were used in this study approached the research as a value based issue.
1.5 Rationale of the Study
The question about the significance of this research can be responded to by the relevance of the professional history of for-profit health institutions and the principles drawn from the evolution of these establishments in the delivery of healthcare. Some of the elements of this history, as shown in the reviewed pieces of literature, have a clear linkage to the present growth of chains of hospitals owned by big profit oriented corporations. However, there is some feeling that a morally significant thing is at stake; something beyond the issues faced by the small scale medical practitioners whose incomes are linked to their medical devices. Two main elements appear to be important in the modern developments of the healthcare sector. These items are the “commercial motivations of for-profit enterprises and the subordination of medicine to the objectives of the lay people” (Rubens and Edward 10). As one will see in the research, neither of these elements is individually a recent concern for the ethics of physicians. Each of these items has arisen more than once in the history of contemporary medicine; however, none of them has singularly presented insurmountable challenges to the trade of practicing medicine (Rubens and Edward 15).
From the literature, one can see that people have uniformly tolerated profit making but frowned at the commercialization in an almost similar fashion. Therefore, a doctor practicing medicine to make profits has never been seen as unacceptable. What people have always emphasized in such a scenario is the maintenance of professional independence within the medical decision-making sphere. It is also clear that on the other hand, the objectives of the lay people have subordinated medicine from time to time; in military and missionary medicine as well as other similar settings (Bagdasarov et al. 9).These situations and many similar situations present serious ethical concerns to the field of private medical practice. From the reviewed literature, it is apparent that health practitioners have their professional codes of ethics to which they subscribe. “It is also evident that there has been a shift in the codes over the years;” they have shifted from “explicit antipathy to the business connotations of such matters as advertising to the adoption of a position that seems little different from that of any ethically practiced business concern” (Guttman 18). More critical is the fact that it is not clear how the general public should take codes that are crafted by professional teams into account even when they state the positions unambiguously. These positions that the professional bodies present as the professional codes are at most a representation of the “moral consensus of the profession” (Guttman 21). More accurately, they are a representation of the portion of the profession that actively takes part in the organized matters of the profession. However, it is also a familiar thing that such activists never tell the whole truth about their jobs (Guttman 22). Even if they did tell the whole truth, there is a wider philosophical challenge in relying on what they articulate as their professional code of ethics to determine the accurate norms for the ethical relationship between the larger public and the professionals. As a result, it was necessary to carry out this research to determine to what extent the professional ethical codes are an accurate reflection of the codes that the public should rightfully expect when relating to the professionals (Bagdasarov et al. 10). After that had been determined, the research was still necessary to identify some of the challenges that made the results of the assessment turn out like they did.
1.6 Dissertation Outline
Introduction: Why was the research being done and what led the researcher to choose the topic.
Research Question: Elaborate all the terms in the research question so as to make them clear.
Literature Outline: who are the primary thinkers? What are the primary texts? What are the fundamental hypothetical ideas?
Research Methodologies: The merits and demerits of various methods, presentation, and analysis of the findings and the data.
Key theorists and the points and people that back them: Contrary arguments and supporting evidence, as well as the researcher’s own opinion on the discussion.
Conclusions and Future Recommendations: What has been discovered about the topic of research and theories for enhancing the subject of the dissertation.
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