TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hinkelmann, Jürgen
A1  - Hasebrook, Joachim
A1  - Volkert, Thomas
A1  - Hahnenkamp, Klaus
T1  - Growing pains at hospitals : opportunities and issues of service expansion in maximum care
T2  - Frontiers in medicine
N2  - Purpose: Due to the demographic change morbidity raises the demand for medical hospital services as well as a need for medical specialization, while economic and human resources are diminishing. Unlike other industries hospitals do not have sufficient data and adequate models to relate growing demands and increasing performance to growth in staff capacity and to increase in staff competences.
Method: Based on huge medical data sample covering the years from 2010 to 2014 with more than 150,000 operations of the Department for Anesthesiology at the University Hospital Muenster, Germany, comparisons are drawn between the development of medical services and the development of personnel capacity and expertise.
Results: The numbers of surgical operations increased by 21% and "skin incision to closure" time by 17%. Simultaneously, personnel capacity grew by 16% largely resting upon recruiting first-time employees. Expertise measured as "years of professional experience" dwindled from 10 years to 5.4 years on average and staff turnover accelerated.
Conclusion: Static benchmark data collected at fixed reference dates do not sufficiently reflect the nexus between capacity and competence and do not reflect the dynamic changes in a hospital’s requirements for expertise and specialization, at all. Staff turnover leads to a loss of experience, which jeopardizes patient safety and hampers medical specialization. In consequence of the dramatic shortage of medical specialists, drop-off rates must be reduced and retention rates must be increased. To that end, working conditions need to be fundamentally converted for a multigeneration, multicultural, and increasingly female workforce.
KW  - anesthesiology
KW  - human resources
KW  - skill mix
KW  - staff capacity
KW  - staff fluctuation
Y1  - 2017
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/45764
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-457646
SN  - 2296-858X
N1  - Copyright: © 2017 Hinkelmann, Hasebrook, Volkert and Hahnenkamp. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
VL  - 4
IS  - Art. 90
SP  - 1
EP  - 9
PB  - Frontiers Media
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -