Feature

When the Hospital is Your Training Ground

Every member of the hospital requires training, which has widened its avenue from CMEs in the class room to e-learning, finds out Sonal Shukla.

What is the factor linking CEOs, doctors, the nursing staff and the front office person working for the same institute? They all find the need for continuous training.

Technology becomes obsolescent after a time, so people need to upgrade themselves continuously in their own arena. Hence, there is a need for training.

"To fulfill patients’ demand, training and development has gained crucial importance - Rupak Barua, Chief Operating Officer, Calcutta Medical Research Institute, Kolkata

Hospitals, today, have realised the need to shed their image of a cluttered and chaotic place. More health and quality-conscious Indian customers and international patients are on the lookout for cheaper yet superior healthcare facilities, which in turn have given a new dimension to the concept of care and indirectly to the training and development scenario. "Hospitals are being compared to hotels and airlines, and the customer is more demanding and expects nothing but warm and hospitable staff," believes Kumar S Krishnaswamy, Group Head - HRD, Wockhardt Hospitals Group, Bangalore.

No more do patients just flock to hospitals for treatment. "To fulfill this demand, training and development has gained crucial importance," says Rupak Barua, Chief Operating Officer, Calcutta Medical Research Institute (CMRI), Kolkata

Setting training standards

"Training and development is a marriage between medical training and service training" - Dr Narottam Puri Executive Director, Max Healthcare, New Delhi

Dr Narottam Puri, Executive Director, Max Healthcare, compares training and development to a marriage between medical training and service training. Fundamentally, training can be largely divided into two segments. The first part covers the continual medical training given to doctors, nurses and paramedics. The second part consists of service and behavioral training given to the front-office staff, telephone operators as well as nurses. While the former ensures that services are as per the quality standards set, the latter is essential for the positive mindset of the employees who will deliver the service.

Learning is a key to competitive advantage and training is seen as the means to achieve it. Training enables to continually work at improving services. "No organisation can choose whether or not to train, the only choice is the method. Our educational system provides us with technical knowledge and therefore it becomes imperative to provide soft skill training," says R Basil, CEO of Manipal Hospital, Bangalore

Soft Skills: Soft skills play a vital role in hospitals to assuage emotionally distraught people who come to the hospital and expect empathy and attention. If the staff is not well trained to handle the customer tactfully, it can backfire on the image of the hospital. Some of the soft skills training programmes conducted at Manipal Hospital include self-awareness, confidence-building, inter-personnel skills, team spirit, corporate communication, behavioral management and leadership. Job-specific training and technical skills training are continuous programmes conducted throughout the year at the hospital.

Leadership programmes: To hone the behavioral skills of its employees, hospitals have initiated leadership programmes for its attendants. An attendant meant to transfer patients from the OT to the ward needs to understand the importance of the process. Through training on process leadership this importance can be instilled. For a manager it is important that he achieves team work, resolve personal issues and extract performance out of his team.

"Also the in-house customer should get prompt response from various departments. All this is possible when you train your employees with regards to what to do, at what time, and how to resolve the issues, if problems arise," states Neeraj Kumar, Manager-HR, Aditya Birla Hospital, Pune.

Internal Team-building: Training programmes are also effective platforms for internal team building. When employees from different departments of a hospital come together by dint of a training initiative, it gives them an opportunity to understand each other better.

An activity-based leadership programme conducted at Mumbai’s Hinduja Hospital had executives and managers from 20 different departments come together for a quiz contest. This initiative proved instrumental for forming a bond and increasing the efficiency of the hospital.

Technical training: The technical workfront of training and development in a hospital includes aspects like evaluation of patients by technicians from ECG, Echo, TMT, X-Ray, and also anaesthesia technicians, physician assistants, cath lab technicians and nursing care professionals. In Frontier Lifeline Hospital (FLH), Chennai, all these aspects of training are provided to the newly-joined technicians and nurses by the already trained staff members. According to Dr N Padmanabhan, Medical Superintendent, FLH, Chennai, the need for extensive training and development starts from the time the patient reports to the hospital.

"For a hospital of international repute like FLH, where a patient reports for a heart ailment, the need for immediate attention is a necessity. Hence, it is important that the staff at all levels is trained to handle emergency patients," he adds.

Keep looking ahead

Depending on the need and vision, Indian hospitals have moulded their training structure. At Hinduja Hospital, the HR department identifies the training needs of its employees for the calendar year, comes up with a calendar and sticks to it. Depending upon the type of programme, a decision is taken to conduct the training programme internally or to outsource it. The main parameters are the category of people who are to be trained, the subjects on which they need training and the kind of output the hospital is looking at in the end.

Max Healthcare has a full-fledged centralised training cell in the form of Max Institute of Medical Education (MIME), which takes care of all its technical training requirements. On the other hand, soft-skills and service training is handled by the HR department. "It is not the question of benefits, but what works best for an organisation. If we have resources within the company, why not utilise them? So, MIME outsources service training to its HR department vis-à-vis HR department outsources medical training to MIME, and it works for us," opines Dr Puri.

Manipal Hospital widely used the concept of 'Training the Trainer', where an internal resource is identified for this programme, who then assists the training department to conduct various training programmes.

Every employee needs training related to his aspect of the job. "We also conduct programmes in Marathi for our attendant category and try to ensure that all categories of employees undergo training," states Ankush Gupta, Manager-HR, PD Hinduja Hospital, Mumbai.

Even HoDs need behavioral training. "I should know how to deal with my customers and my first customer is my staff. Am I only limited to my technical skill or I should know the supervisory or managerial skills? All the doubts and uncertainties are addressed in training," Gupta explains.

Newer methods

However, all training programmes need not be boardroom-oriented. Hospitals have discovered that e-learning is equivalent to a virtual classroom where a professional from his own centre learns the curriculum. "We have installed Edusat for DNB candidates and tele-lectures are regularly conducted from Southampton General Hospital, UK, and also from eminent professors in the field of cardiology, cardiac surgery and anaesthesia, using tele-medicine facility," says Dr Padmanabhan. For the training purpose and awarding the qualification, the hospital has tied up with IIT (Chennai) for medical biotechnology and BITS-Pilani for physician assistant courses. Under the Management Development Programme (MDP), hospitals even send their employees to hospitals abroad for training.

The challenges

"There is a gap between what the nurses and doctors are expected to do in the hospitals and what they are trained to do during their teaching. The expectations are different. Who will fill this gap? The medical and nursing colleges are not filling it," says Puri. The cases in point are the medical colleges in countries like the US and the UK, where skills like basic communication skills are not only taught but examinations are taken, which if not passed, the medical degree is not offered.

As the healthcare industry does not come under the organised sector, the backup staff is not always trained. Front office staff possess mind blocks which hinder them from understanding the patients' state of mind.

Any training and development activity will only work when the top management is committed. For that, a training budget needs to be allocated, believes DP Yadav, GM, Personnel and HRD of Lilavati Hospital, Mumbai. He also feels that there is a lack of qualified people in hospital HR to acknowledge and understand the training needs of the staff.

As is anticipated, since more and more trained doctors, technicians of Indian origin abroad are returning to India, there will be a continuous need and necessity for carrying out training of hospital employees.

sonal.shukla@expressindia.com