Principal speaker
Dr Sandra Lawrence
Abstract: Growing financial and societal pressure is increasing the need for healthcare organisations to improve all aspects of clinical performance. The pressure for organisational change to improve efficiency and effectiveness is particularly pronounced in the hospital sector, which is the most resource-intensive component of the health care system. Regulators e.g., government, key industry accreditation bodies such as the Australian Council of Healthcare Standards (ACHS), also aim to influence the particular organisational changes hospitals undertake through targeted feedback and suggested interventions. Research has previously shown that human resource management (HRM) practices and processes do play an important role in shaping organisational performance outcomes. Within the hospital contact, we believe that there is an urgent need to understand theoretically and empirically, how hospitals can transform and improve the effectiveness of key HRM processes, and the associated impact of these processes on clinical performance, over time.
Through an ARC Linkage project, our research team (Keith Townsend, Sandra Lawrence, Adrian Wilkinson (GU) and David Greenfield (UNSW)), in conjunction with industry partner ACHS, are examining these issues through a series of studies using Australian hospitals as our sampling population and drawing data from interviews with key hospital staff, qualitative ACHS accreditation reports, and quantitative ACHS accreditation and clinical indicator databases.
This seminar will outline four of our studies, some of which are still in preparation. Study 1 tests a model of how the effectiveness of HRM processes influence hospitals’ clinical performance (continuity of quality patient care) in the context of processes emerging from three other hospital sub-systems (strategic and operations management, information management, and health and safety). Study 2 examines the degree to which accreditation ratings motivate hospitals to make changes to both their HRM processes and continuity of quality patient care process over time. Study 3 examines managers’ perceptions of the contribution of the accreditation process in achieving exemplary levels of HRM performance in hospitals. Study 4 examines the degree to which particular care processes act as mediating mechanisms linking HRM processes to clinical performance.
Speaker:
Having recently completed a Research Fellowship in the Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing, Dr Sandra Lawrence has now joined the Department of Employment Relations and Human Resources as a Senior Lecturer. Her research focuses on the role of HRM processes in shaping performance in hospitals and emerging from her thesis work, the use of emotion regulation to deal with anger in response to managerial injustice.
Sandra has published work in A*-/ A- ABDC ranked journals such as Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Vocational Behavior, Applied Ergonomics, International Journal of Human Resource Management and the British Journal of Management. She is currently a chief investigator on two ARC grants and is an editorial board member of the Australian Journal of Management and Journal of Applied Behavioral Studies.
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RSVP
RSVP on or before Thursday 25 July 2013 , by email wow@griffith.edu.au , or by phone 07 3735 3714