HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS IN PRIMARY HEALTH CARE PRACTICE - SURVEY

Abstract

Many ministries of health and other organizations, such as professional councils and educational bodies, already maintain a human resources information system (HRIS) to record the status of health workers and graduates. A well-functioning HRIS constitutes a registry of health workers that tracks the “lifespan” of health professionals from the time they are licensed and employed until they leave the health workforce. An electronic HRIS provides an efficient way to manage information on the workforce. Standardized health workforce data should ultimately be compiled from the HRIS maintained by various organizations into a common health workforce registry from which core indicators can be directly calculated at national and subnational levels.
The aims of the research are the opinion and attitudes of the primary health care specialists regarding the establishment of a unified national register of health workers.
Material and methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted using an original questionnaire including 16 questions. Covered were 73 general practitioners (GPs) from Plovdiv region, working in individual outpatient practices for primary healthcare - 58 (79.5%) and group primary care 15 (20.5%). The significance level was p<0.05. The results are summarized with descriptive statistical methods using statistical software package SPSS v.19.0. and MS Excel for Windows.
Results: 68.5% of the respondents express the need to maintain a health worker registry, 35.6% expect such a register to be used by all medical specialists and 32.9% even think that it should be public and 65.8% state they would join a national registry of the primary health worker.
Conclusion: A national register of health workers typically involves numerous data collection and entry steps and many users countrywide, all of which pose challenges to ensuring data quality. Human resources information systems are successful when they support policy and management decisions and when those decisions lead to better health care. However, success depends on the quality of the human resources for health data going into the system.