Job Description and its Impact in Health Care
Job descriptions are fundamental to every company’s recruitment process. Barbara Spencer Hawk (1998) stated that they guide critical activities such as the development of all recruitment announcements from job ads to special postings or on-line notices, and the initial screening phases for the evaluation of the applicants’ abilities corresponding to the criteria detailed in the description (p. 29)
Job descriptions are a document developed prior to staff recruitment not only as a guide to hiring process but also to provide a basis for the employee compensations. They are derived from the analysis of the content of the particular job and are different from a person specification which describes the attributes required of an employee to do the job (Cushway, B. 2003, p. 2). Job descriptions document are also derived from the information obtained from describe tasks and responsibilities that make up a job, which are essential to a particular job.
Impact in Health Care Organization
Job descriptions impact the health care organization through the guidelines they provide which include the basic responsibilities of the health care workers to be efficient in their performance of their duties. More over, job descriptions allow interactions wherein individuals in the jobs can interact with others in the organization. This interaction is important in health care, in view of the cross training methods, which according to Janice Rider Ellis and Celia Love Hartley (2003) “are important when cross training is used in the organization. Cross training means teaching fellow workers to do functions associated with another position which is important in reducing cost trough individual’s efficiency being able to do more than one set of task.
Job descriptions impact the health care organization through providing foundations for performance standards of all health care workers from the top position down to the bottom list that serves as the basis for performance evaluation (Ellis & Hartley, p. 456). In other words, with out job descriptions, the delivery of health care services will be in acute situation and the individual health care workers performance will be miserable.
Reference
Cushway, B. 2003) The Handbook of Model descriptions UK: Kugan Page Publishers
Ellis, J. R. Nursing in Today’s World USA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
Hawk, B.S. (1998) What Employer Really Want USA: McGraw-Hill Professional