Health Care

In relation to this, it can be mentioned that in the contemporary era healthcare organizations and healthcare professionals are usually facing varied new as well as evolving challenges in terms of healthcare requirements, evolving diseases, ageing population related discrepancies and management related issues among others (Beelitz 2015). At the same time, it can be mentioned that healthcare organizations are also witnessing varied challenges in terms of new regulations, financial constraints and establishing efficient best practice related problems.

The current shortage of some health professionals creates a stressful work environment where few people have the time, energy or will to experiment with new models of healthcare delivery.

The healthcare field is one of the biggest and rapidly growing fields today. The aging population has been the primary reason for the growth spurt of this field in the past couple of years. As the baby boomers grow old, there will be an increasing number of people who will need special age-related care. Furthermore, in the past couple of years, more and more people are becoming health conscious. They want to remain fit and take care of themselves. They make regular checkup appointments with their doctors to ensure they are fit and leading a healthy life. Due to these reasons, the health care industry is flourishing, and it needs more professionals.

Globally, the demand for education is higher than what can be supplied. When it comes to healthcare education and professionals, there is a “global imbalance”. In 2013, the World Health Organization (WHO), stated that we are short of 7.2 million health workers, and this number is expected to nearly double to 12.9 million by 2035. The WHO cited the age of the health workforce, lack of youth filling healthcare jobs, inadequate training, and that “internal and international migration of health workers is also exacerbating regional imbalances”. Furthermore, several journals and organizations, including the WHO, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Health Volunteers Overseas, Human Resources for Health, and Routledge International Handbook of Medical Education, have all stated that the global healthcare work imbalance is a global crisis, all suggesting different paths to reduce the current imbalance.

More than a quarter of the world’s countries do not have enough health care workers. The world needs 4 million new health workers to address global workforce shortages. The urgency to address the health care worker crisis is a challenge for all high-, middle- and low -income countries alike. Health care worker shortages affect Germany and the USA, just like they affect India or Uganda. Western countries ‘import’ workers from developing countries, because they are also short of trained health workers. Aging populations are exacerbating the problem (Global Health Workforce Alliance, 2013).

All across the globe, there are people in need of the care and knowledge that health care professionals provide. Given so, it should come as no surprise that there is a very high demand for health care providers internationally. The recruitment and retention of health care employees is vital to the success and growth of the health care industry. That is why it is so important that health care facilities provide excellent work conditions, as well as competitive wages and reasonable work hours, for their employees.

The literature has been unable to agree on a definition or the concepts behind KM (Bhatt, 2001; Hlupic, et al., 2002; Neef, 1999). For instance, Snowden (1998) defines KM as the identification, optimization and active management of intellectual assets, either in the form of explicit knowledge held in artifacts or tacit knowledge possessed by individuals or communities; Hedlund (1994) suggests that KM addresses the generation, representation, storage, transfer, transformation, application, embedding, and protecting of organizational knowledge; Brooking (1997) suggests that KM is the activity which is concerned with strategy and tactics to manage human centered assets; De Jarnet (1996) defines KM as knowledge creation, which is followed by knowledge

Health workers play a crucial role in ensuring the appropriate management of all aspects of the health system: From logistics and facility management to finances and health‑care interventions. Furthermore, because a society’s health and its development are strongly linked, health workers have an indirect but vital role in the achievement of sustainable human and economic

World Health Organization estimates, there are 59.8 million health care worker worldwide, representing 12% of the working population globally. About two-thirds of them (39.5 million) provide health services; the other one-third (19.8 million) are management and support workers, which includes those working in ancillary departments such as laundry departments (Kumar et al., 2014 and Goniewicz et al., 2012).

The migration of health workers from developing countries to developed countries has arisen several aspects regarding this global trend. This phenomenon so-called ‘’brain drain’’ is defined as the movement of intellectual and highly qualified professionals in pursuit of improved quality of life, higher wages, access to high-technology and good working conditions (Dodani & LaPorte, 2005; Afzal et al., 2012). This movement has become a global concern in the 1940s, when professionals migrated from Europe to the United States of America (USA) and United Kingdom (UK) (Dodani & LaPorte, 2005; Afzal et al., 2012). The ‘’brain drain’’ has economic, social and health implications including the impact on healthcare systems in source

Healthcare is a huge part of our lives. Professionals in this field assist in educating the general public, nursing individuals with ailments back to health, and assisting with keeping America in good health. There are many challenges that the healthcare field is faced with; including, a shortage of workers, the 2010 health care reform, and the disparities of diversity.

The rapid development of the global healthcare industry is changing the global workforce situation in health systems. Therefore, it is critical to consider the possible solutions for the issues created by this development. There are three main workforce challenges that are faced by governments, healthcare organizations, and healthcare workers: an aging population with chronic diseases, an elderly workforce, and technology. Following a complete literature review, this report points out the current situations and predicts future healthcare issues, which include the growing demand for healthcare workforce to care for those with chronic conditions, knowledge and professional loss due to the aging workforce, and changes in the technology used. In addition, the report also discusses the possible ways of addressing these challenges, such as the reform of educational model, the worker retention framework, and the technology acceptance model (TAM). Finally, some recommendations were provided after considering the usefulness and limitations of the theories used in the report.

Knowledge is the primary resource in every organization. If that knowledge is lost, the impact to an organization is unknown. Knowledge loss occurs in organizations because they allow highly skilled workers to walk out the door without a process to capture their knowledge. One study believes if organization create a learning organization where knowledge is spread across all employees, knowledge loss would be at a minimum (Shanker, Mittal, Rabinowitz, Baveja, & Acharia, 2013). However, Joe, Yoong, and Patel (2013) do not believe that all workers that leave the company are highly skilled, they posited that leaders need to check to see if these workers possess the key knowledge that would hinder production. Dewah (2013) understood the importance of finding the subject matter experts within an organization. In his study on three broadcasting station, the results showed that if the subject matter experts left the company, their

Fortune 500 companies lose roughly “$31.5 billion a year by failing to share knowledge” (Babcock, 2004, p. 46), a very scary figure in this global economy filled with turbulence and change. Social issues in knowledge capture and its reuse will result in decreasing chances of success. Those issues could increase costly mistakes and failure in services to clients. Some of the consequences of the social issues in knowledge management can be described as follows:

A number of studies have analysed that KHWIS consists of health workforce supply and distribution of four health professional councils. These are the Nursing Council of Kenya, the Kenya Medical Laboratory Technicians, Clinical Officers Council and the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Broad as can be seen from in Figure 3 (Kenya Health Workforce, 2010; Ministry of Medical Services, 2011). In 2010, KHWIS has collected all of health care workers in the public sector from every province to the deployment database in chief nursing officer, clinical officer, medical service and laboratory officer. Besides, KHWIS expanded also to collect health workforce data in private sectors (Kenya Health Workforce, 2010; National Academies, 2011; Emory School of Nursing, 2010).