TITLE:
Patients’ Satisfaction with the Quality of Care in the Tunisian Private Hospitals during the Second Wave of COVID-19 Pandemic: Does Human Resource Planning Matter?
AUTHORS:
Faten Methammem, Mohamed Anis Ben Abdallah
KEYWORDS:
Human Resource Planning, Patients’ Satisfaction, COVID-19 Pandemic, Private Hospitals, Tunisia
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Human Resource and Sustainability Studies,
Vol.10 No.2,
June
20,
2022
ABSTRACT: Human resources need planning to meet the firms’ objectives and help them
achieve advantages over their competitors. Therefore, the right management of
the right people at the right time has the power and energy to embed
sustainability across the organization not only in normal circumstances but
also in turbulent and crisis times. As far as we know, no previous research has
investigated the value of human resource planning (HRP) during a crisis
period/time, like that of COVID-19. For this reason, a new approach is needed
to explore the role of HRP in the context of crisis periods or disaster
situations. Actually, it is in hospitals that human resource management (HRM)
practices take on special meaning. However, the relationship between HRM and
healthcare is very complex as the employees’ behavior is directly correlated
with the patient’s satisfaction. During the outbreak of COVID-19, it became
increasingly important to recognize the patient’s satisfaction criteria regarding
how hospitals serve the patients. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the
impact of the HRP on the patients’ satisfaction during the outbreak of an
imminent pandemic, like COVID-19. For this purpose, we developed two
contrasting samples: private
hospitals’ directors (n = 85) and private hospitals’ patients (n = 858). We
used structural equation modeling to assess the links between human resource
planning and the patients’ satisfaction with the quality of care. In fact, our
careful review of the literature provides us with a deep discussion on the
practices of human resource planning. The results showed that some human
resource planning practices are positively related to the patients’
satisfaction while others are negatively related.