‘Human Resource Dev, Key To Healthcare Efficiency’

The Medical Director (MD), Federal Medical Centre, Ebute-Metta, Lagos, Dr Adedamola Dada, has urged every organisation and employee to develop a strategic human resource plan, to increase operational efficiency.
Dada gave the advice at the 2022 Annual Conference of the Society for Quality in Healthcare in Nigeria (SQHN), weekend.
The theme of the conference was: “Human Resource for Healthcare: Building An Efficient & Resilient Workforce”.
He said workers in the healthcare sector had suffered huge human resource development setbacks that resulted to massive brain drain.
According to him, the inability of an organisation to address the major issues that enhance human resource and capacity development is a major cause of brain drain and poor workforce in Nigeria.
The MD identified specific steps to achieve strategic human resource plan to include training, motivation, adequate working tools, mentoring, reward and discipline.
“Organisations should be able to identify, encourage and retain its human resource which is key to efficient growth and development of any organisation.
“The ability of an organisation to continually train and develop its human resource is a key step to enhance quality of service delivery.
“The Nigeria healthcare sector presently suffers brain drain and workforce challenges due to the inability to put the right strategic human resource in place.
“The healthcare organisations lack the capacity to retain the talented human resource,” he said.
Dada noted that an organisation could be overstaffed, yet lack enough workers in the critical clinical sections as the case in some health Institutions.
A Human Resource Professional, Dr Obinna Obi, identified poor human resource planning and budget as the major barrier to human resource management.
Obi, a key speaker at the conference, said most healthcare organisations provided little or no budget for human resource management and development.
He noted that other challenges to human resource management as employee burnout, mental wellbeing, skill mix and distribution.
He said there was no provision for training and retraining for human resource in many organisations, adding that up-to-date knowledge acquisition particularly for healthcare workforce was necessary for effective service delivery.
“Aside from good renumeration and motivation, a lot of organisations do not deem it necessary to send its workforce for overseas training and refresher courses.
“To get the best from human resource, there is need to make budget and invest in it; but if you don’t spend resources on human resource, then you fail,” Obi said.