Health Recruitment
In many countries, the past 10 years have seen a substantial change in the balance between the supply of and the demand for health-care services. The supply of health-care services is now struggling to satisfy the growing demand for a wide variety of health-care products, from cosmetic surgery to laser eye corrective surgery. Moreover, the limited supply of skilled medical personnel—which characterised the profession until the early-1980s and resulted in many consumers accepting whatever medical services were available, whenever and wherever they could find them—is again surfacing as a critical problem in many countries, and in particular, in Australia1.The problem of growing demand for health care is compounded by at least two issues that have been a feature of the health-care sector for decades, even in those periods of supplyand- demand equilibrium. In the first instance, the majority of public (and many private)
health-care providers have stated their organisational missions are to meet the health-care
needs of their total constituency. In many cases it may be strategically unattractive (and in some situations it may not be financially viable) to provide certain needed services for
every segment. Operating under this constraint means that many health-care providers find it considerably difficult to accrue sufficient funds beyond those required, in order to
maintain a current level of service—let alone to try to invest in new services and
technologies that require increased staffing levels. Second, it is difficult to find a service that has a higher degree of inseparability or a greater degree of customer participation than health care. Both the health-care provider and the patient are usually part of the ‘factory’ and patient participation is required at multiple levels. Patients need to provide detailed information about their health backgrounds and, often, their family backgrounds. In many cases, the patient needs to decide on a course of treatment and it may be over a prolonged period. In addition, the patient needs to follow the treatment path until recovery and the patient often needs to follow a post-recovery program.
This process usually includes regular communication with health professionals or support
staff. Even if the patient is not involved in every consultation, this often means that
caregivers, relatives or friends are involved in the health-care process and they are seeking information from health professionals. Technology is helping to diffuse medical information and it is helping patients to perform their roles more adequately, but it does have a long way to go before it replaces the cocreation required during a health-care service. For example, a manufacturing organization that provided its employees with regular check-ups by medical staff decided to jettison the process by using technology that provided many of the usual tests performed at the sixmonthly sessions.
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