In the present era, it is common for human resource departments to undergo in-depth restructuring to increase the efficiency of service delivery. However, the County Hospital, in this scenario, proposed initiatives that violated the legal rights of its workers. Foremost, the healthcare agency proposed a strategy where employees were reassigned to specific job roles based on gender criteria. Due to this flawed strategy, the organization violated crucial gender equality laws. On top of that, the County Hospital revised job strategies for specific workers. As a result, the organization violated laws that protect handicapped workers in the workplace. Lastly, the third initiative restricted the recruitment of workers who exceeded 35 years. This initiative was a major violation of age discrimination rights in the country. The novel initiatives were all infringing on the employees' rights, thus examining their weaknesses will help to propose initiatives that adhere to legal regulations with no detrimental impact on the performance of staff.
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Firstly, the County Hospital proposed initiatives that escalated gender discrimination in the workforce. In this case, gender discrimination refers to any exclusion, distinction, or restrictive practice that places staff in a disadvantaged position based on socially constructed gender roles (Newman, 2014). A large number of hospitals in the country record severe gender inequalities in specific departments (Newman, 2014). The distribution of female and male workers in specific departments is usually aimed at making patients more or less comfortable with their healthcare providers. Nowadays, job occupations such as nutrition, nursing, and community health work are attributed to female workers. Contrarily, the largest concentration of male workers tends to be recorded in pharmacy roles (Newman, 2014). With that said, it is clear that the County Hospital violated gender equality rights when it segregated employees based on their gender instead of their performance and competency. Therefore, the County Hospital needs to revise its gender segregation policies to mitigate the severity of gender rights violations.
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The County Hospital should propose strategies that ensure the equitable distribution of workers without breaking gender equality statutes. As such, the hospital needs to develop a unified conceptual framework that guarantees equal opportunities for male and female workers. Although discrimination is usually difficult to measure due to differences in perceptions and measurement criteria, several frameworks are appropriate for dealing with gender inequality (Newman, 2014). In this case, the conceptual framework should focus on adapting affirmative action during the reassignment of workers. Affirmative action can be implemented by prohibiting direct and indirect discrimination while at the same time, availing equal opportunities for career advancement. Through this strategy, it will be easy to discern whether the hospital will deviate from stipulated gender-based statutes. All in all, the hospital can increase the performance of staff by reducing the frequency of gender bias.
The second initiative was proposed to increase the efficiency of healthcare occupation roles, but it brought about negative consequences for disabled employees. In the workplace, disabled employees represent a significant population of minority employees. Disability rights legislations are often enforced when handling accommodation rights for disabled workers. According to recent studies, countries like the United States report high populations of disabled residents such that 8.9% of youthful citizens have at least on disability ( Waliany, 2016) . Despite having such a large population of disabled residents, numerous hospitals are prone to violating disability laws for mentally and physically challenged employees. Furthermore, physicians who develop disabilities tend to experience critical hurdles when obtaining accommodations from their employers. Resultantly, disabled workers usually leave clinical practice to pursue teaching, administrative, or corporate positions (Waliany, 2016). When the County Hospital revised the job descriptions of its workforce, it failed to take into consideration the complex needs of disadvantaged members of staff.
The initiative, which calls for the amendment of job descriptions for healthcare workers, needs to be adjusted to take into account the rights of disabled employees. Most employers harbor ill-founded opinions regarding the performance of workers with disabilities. Nonetheless, there is considerable evidence which indicates that HR managers who accommodated employees’ disabilities increased the performance of 72% of the handicapped workforce (Bonaccio et al., 2019). In essence, the strategy to revise the job descriptions of workers is aimed at reducing the mismatch of workers with their responsibilities. For that reason, the best proposal for reducing disability rights violations is to assess whether disabled employees are affected by human resource restructuring initiatives. Afterward, it would be possible to integrate disability accommodations at each stage of the employment cycle: recruitment, employee section, social integration, and performance management (Bonaccio et al., 2019). Therefore, the County Hospital is advised to adjust the second initiative to minimize detrimental impacts to workers with disabilities.
The third initiative proposed by the County Hospital focused on recruiting youthful and energetic employees. However, the strategy to only recruit workers who are under 35 years may lead to age discrimination violations. In general, regulations against age discrimination prohibit prejudice in any aspect of employment, particularly when hiring, paying, firing, handing out promotions, training workers, or offering benefits (Phillips, 2019). On this note, this form of discrimination primarily protects employees who are at least 40 years old. The widespread belief that older workers are less motivated and inflexible has triggered major problems in the healthcare industry. On this note, the government takes age discrimination claims very seriously due to the growing population of older citizens and millennial Americans (Phillips, 2019). Therefore, the County Hospital’s decision to recruit workers who are under the age of 35 is a clear violation of age discrimination policies. Overall, the hospital’s advertisement needs to be corrected before legal claims are filed against the organization.
In this case, the County Hospital is advised to implement policies that are both legal and efficient. Thus, the best recommendation for any corporate organization is to avoid getting embroiled in age discrimination litigations altogether (Phillips, 2019). The decision to recruit young healthcare workers is commendable so long as it does not lead to negative consequences during healthcare delivery. To prevent litigation, the advertisement needs to remove the age restriction placed on recruits. Moreover, the revised advertisement should recruit registered nurses who are fresh out of campus. If practical experience is the most crucial necessity, the advertisement will invite workers who have 5-10 years of practical experience in the hospital. Through this strategy, the County Hospital will recruit young healthcare workers who have sufficient qualifications to work as healthcare providers. In the end, this initiative will increase the recruitment of an energetic workforce in the County Hospital.
Conclusion
To sum up, the initiatives proposed by the County Hospital are inherently flawed since they leave the organization susceptible to litigation. The initiative to distribute job roles following employee gender increases gender inequality in the workplace. However, this weakness can be solved by delegating responsibilities about occupational competency and performance. When looking at the second initiative, disability regulation violations can be mitigated by emphasizing employee disability accommodations. By doing so, the hospital will increase the performance of disabled workers without completely withdrawing the proposal. Lastly, the age restriction policies can be safeguarded by altering the advertisement to recruit fresh graduates or workers who meet the fundamental qualifications of the occupation. To sum up, the County Hospital is advised to introduce policies that meet the organization’s objectives with the legal stipulations.
References
Bonaccio, S., Connelly, C. E., Gellatly, I. R., Jetha, A., & Ginis, K. A. M. (2019). The participation of people with disabilities in the workplace across the employment cycle: Employer concerns and research evidence. Journal of Business and Psychology , 10 (1), 1-24. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10869-018-9602-5
Newman, C. (2014). Time to address gender discrimination and inequality in the health workforce. Human resources for health , 12 (1), 25-43. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1478-4491-12-25
Phillips, F. (2019). Healthcare Industry Sees Increase in Age Discrimination Claims. Fisher Phillips Newsletter. https://www.fisherphillips.com/resources-newsletters-article-healthcare-industry-sees-increase-in-age-discrimination-claims
Waliany, S. (2016). Health Professionals with Disabilities: Motivating Inclusiveness and Representation. AMA Journal of Ethics , 18 (10), 971-974. https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/health-professionals-disabilities-motivating-inclusiveness-and-representation/2016-10
