Employees morale and psychological needs are some of the most discussed topics within most organizations recently. Employees are the important assets for any organization, as they are the main reason behind the success or failure of a company. Therefore when company faces high employee turnover rates, one might need to consider and investigate the root of the cause to prohibit the situation to worsen, as no company should ever underestimate the power of employees.
Decades ago, many dream of working for the Hong Kong Government, people even labeled it as “Metal Bowl” to portray the job security and the superb working hours it can offer. As the transition of British colonies to The People’s Republic of China in 1997, the government has implemented many policies, which caused interference to such “Metal Bowl”.
Hong Kong Hospital Authority (HA) is a governance statutory body, for which are responsible for managing Hong Kong’s public hospitals. The body employs around 59,000 people; close to 50% is professional medical staff (doctors and nurses), where nurses summed up the total of the 25,000 plus medical professionals. The Hospital Authority Report 2010-2011 shows that the number of outpatient attendances is over 10,000,000, in the mean time year 2011 is the year where HA encountered the highest nurses turnover rates in decades. Even though, shortages of nurses or other professional medical staff is one common dilemma among many countries (Appendix 1). However, as Hong Kong is a small city with a relatively low population compare to other countries, such high turnover has revealed the underlie problems of HA and the reasons behind it all.
The HA sets out a clear core values for their staff to follow (Appendix 2), they emphasis immensely on the importance of PEOPLE, however the high turnover rate might reflects the problematic issues of the group. In recent years, the professional medical staff’s turnover is reaching to its maximum heights (Appendix 3), HA understands the urgency of the problems and how it can truly affect their image as well as their service level to the general public, and therefore they have been launching different kind of programs in hopes to disentangle the problems. However the effectiveness of those programs might require some period to demonstrate a positive result.
In this study, we will critically analyze the main issues of HA in causing the high turnover of a targeted group of medical professional – Nurses, and critically evaluate their current solution as well as to propose suggestion for enhancement.
There are 5 main issues which have constructed the results of the high turnover rate for HA. Each issue is as problematic as the other, with the continue neglect of these problems, it will not only causes damage to HA but to the Hong Kong society as a whole.
Retaining nurses has been one of the major challenges of HA. In terms of pay, private hospitals provide a more competitive salary than HA does. The starting salary of a registered nurse (RN) that works for private hospital is more than $30,000 per month, which is equivalent to Point 20 of HA pay scale. On a contrary, if she works for HA, she only gets $23,000, which is 5 points lower than the offer of private hospital. Besides, the maximum salary of the same position also varies and private hospital are able to provide a more attractive financial reward to the right candidate including double pay and higher amount of cash allowance.