HD570 Unit 5 Staffing Plan Example

A Surplus in English, a Shortfall in Spanish: A Unit 5 Staffing Plan for a Health Plan's Health Education Department

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

HD570: Health Education Leadership and Management

Unit 5 Staffing Plan

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Ashcombe Health Plan, its staff, workload and hours are composite; the regulatory, interpreter and budgeting sources cited are real.

Supply

Six health educators deliver program work. Each holds a full-time position of 2,080 paid hours. From that, the plan subtracts 248 hours of leave and holidays, 40 hours of required training and 220 hours of department meetings and supervision, leaving 1,572 productive hours per educator. Six educators supply about 9,430 hours. The manager, materials specialist and coordinator are not counted as program capacity, since their time goes to supervision, production and administration.

Demand

Next year's work, after the Unit 4 changes end the newsletter and the open-enrollment classes, requires these hours:

Outreach calls and texts to pregnant and new mothers and to families due for well-child visits: 4,100 hours. Review of other departments' member notices: 1,520 hours. Department materials development: 900 hours. Remaining classes, prenatal series only: 600 hours. Health fairs: 400 hours. Educators' administrative tasks and documentation: 1,445 hours. Total: 8,965 hours.

Hours per task come from the October time log, the outreach call system's records of average call length and attempts per member, and last year's notice volume.

The Language Requirement

About a third of the plan's members prefer Spanish, and among pregnant members the share is higher. Federal rules require that plans provide member information in prevalent non-English languages and make oral interpretation available (Information Requirements, 2024). The department's Spanish-required hours by activity are: outreach, 1,720; notice review, 380; materials, 300; classes, 300; health fairs, 225. Total: 2,925 hours.

One health educator speaks Spanish fluently. Even if that person did only Spanish-language work, they could supply 1,572 hours. The shortfall is 1,353 Spanish hours.

The department has enough hours in total and not enough in the language a third of its work requires, and a staffing plan that reported only the total would send the department into the year promising work it cannot deliver.

Options

Option 1: use the telephone interpreter line. English-speaking educators would make Spanish outreach calls through an interpreter. Trained interpreters raise the quality of communication and care when patients speak limited English, according to a systematic review (Karliner et al., 2007), yet every interpreted call runs longer than a direct one. Using an estimate of 1.6 English-speaking educator hours per Spanish contact hour, covering 1,353 hours would require about 2,165 educator hours, far more than the 465-hour surplus. Interpreter charges would add about $44,650 a year. This option cannot close the gap.

Option 2: redeploy the bilingual educator entirely to Spanish work and move their English work to colleagues. This uses the surplus fully and still leaves a shortfall of about 1,350 Spanish hours.

Option 3: reduce Spanish-language commitments. Not acceptable; the notice review and outreach in Spanish are required or directly tied to the quality withhold.

Option 4: hire a second bilingual health educator. Cost: about $81,920 a year including benefits. This closes most of the gap, combined with Option 2.

Recommendation

Adopt Option 2 now and request Option 4 in the Unit 8 resource proposal. Until a second bilingual educator is hired, use the interpreter line for the highest-priority Spanish outreach, postpartum calls, and accept that some lower-priority Spanish work, such as health fair attendance, will be reduced. The department will tell other departments plainly that Spanish notice review may take longer.

Effect on Quality

Spanish-speaking postpartum members are the group the department currently reaches least. The outreach system shows that 45 percent of them received a completed call last year, compared with 78 percent of English-speaking members. Every Spanish hour the department cannot supply falls mostly on that group, and through it on the plan's postpartum measure. Closing the Spanish shortfall is therefore both a language access obligation and the department's most direct lever on the quality withhold.

How the Plan Will Be Communicated

Staff will see the plan before it goes to leadership. The bilingual educator's assignment will change most, and the manager will discuss the change, including workload limits and a plan to prevent burnout, before it is final. Other departments will be told in writing which Spanish services will be slower until a second bilingual educator is hired, with expected turnaround times for each.

Risks

If the one bilingual educator leaves, the department loses nearly all its Spanish capacity at once. That risk is the strongest argument for a second hire, and the plan names it as such. Naming single points of failure alongside totals is part of honest capacity planning, and personnel is by far the largest and least flexible cost in a department like this one (Finkler et al., 2019).

Review

The plan will be checked each quarter against actual hours logged by language. If Spanish demand differs from the estimate by more than ten percent, the plan will be revised and the change explained to staff.

References

Finkler, S. A., Smith, D. L., & Calabrese, T. D. (2019). Financial management for public, health, and not-for-profit organizations (6th ed.). CQ Press.

Information Requirements, 42 C.F.R. § 438.10 (2024). https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-42/chapter-IV/subchapter-C/part-438/subpart-A/section-438.10

Karliner, L. S., Jacobs, E. A., Chen, A. H., & Mutha, S. (2007). Do professional interpreters improve clinical care for patients with limited English proficiency? A systematic review of the literature. Health Services Research, 42(2), 727-754. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6773.2006.00629.x