HA255 Unit 1 Personnel Roles Discussion Post Example

Designed Downtown, Done at the Desk: A Discussion Post Arguing That Most Personnel Decisions on One Composite Adult Medical Floor Are Made by the Nurse Manager and Only Recorded by Human Resources

HA255 · Unit 1 Discussion Board Post

Posted by [Student Name]

The unit, the hospital and the attendance example are composite; bracketed figures stand in for the writer's own workplace.

Initial Post

Most personnel decisions on a hospital nursing unit are made by the manager and merely recorded by human resources. My composite workplace is an adult medical floor, [32] beds, run by a day and a night charge nurse under one manager, and when I list what actually happens to a staff member from posting to exit, the department downtown owns the forms while the person who decides sits at the nurses' station.

Take six tasks. Posting a vacancy: human resources writes the template and sets the pay range; the manager decides the posting is needed and what it asks for. Screening: human resources checks the license and minimum requirements; the manager chooses whom to interview. Interviewing: human resources supplies the approved questions; the manager and two staff nurses ask them and rank the answers. Scheduling: the system is built centrally; the manager builds the actual six-week schedule and approves every swap. Coaching on attendance: the policy is written centrally; the manager notices, talks and documents. Ending employment: human resources reviews the file and handles the legal steps; the manager starts it.

On paper human resources owns the personnel system, but at the start of a shift nearly every decision belongs to the nurse manager.

Attendance shows the split best. When a nurse arrived late three times in [five] weeks, nothing in the policy acted on its own. The manager decided the pattern mattered, held the conversation and wrote the note that human resources later filed. Reviews of nurse turnover keep finding that leadership and the relationship with the immediate manager shape whether nurses stay, which fits a picture in which personnel work is done locally (Halter et al., 2017). Supervisor relations are only one of several turnover predictors, and their effect is modest compared with job satisfaction and the search for other work (Griffeth et al., 2000), so I would not claim the manager decides everything.

Where my claim weakens is a union hospital. If a contract governs scheduling, seniority and discipline, then the steps, the timing and the evidence a manager needs are set outside the unit, and the manager's discretion shrinks.

Reply to [Classmate J.]

[J.], your outpatient clinic sounds like the opposite case: you said the practice administrator handles hiring for every site and the clinic supervisors never see a résumé. Is that because the clinics are small, or because the organization wanted consistent hiring across sites? If it is size, I would expect the line to move toward the supervisors as the clinics grow. If it is a deliberate choice, the supervisors still decide attendance and scheduling, so they would sit in the same place as my manager for half of the six tasks.

References

Griffeth, R. W., Hom, P. W., & Gaertner, S. (2000). A meta-analysis of antecedents and correlates of employee turnover: Update, moderator tests, and research implications for the next millennium. Journal of Management, 26(3), 463-488. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920630002600305

Halter, M., Boiko, O., Pelone, F., Beighton, C., Harris, R., Gale, J., Gourlay, S., & Drennan, V. (2017). The determinants and consequences of adult nursing staff turnover: A systematic review of systematic reviews. BMC Health Services Research, 17(1), Article 824. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-017-2707-0