Patients’ Satisfaction with the Quality of Care in the Tunisian Private Hospitals during the Second Wave of COVID-19 Pandemic: Does Human Resource Planning Matter?

Abstract

Human resources need planning to meet the firms’ objectives and help them achieve advantages over their competitors. Therefore, the right management of the right people at the right time has the power and energy to embed sustainability across the organization not only in normal circumstances but also in turbulent and crisis times. As far as we know, no previous research has investigated the value of human resource planning (HRP) during a crisis period/time, like that of COVID-19. For this reason, a new approach is needed to explore the role of HRP in the context of crisis periods or disaster situations. Actually, it is in hospitals that human resource management (HRM) practices take on special meaning. However, the relationship between HRM and healthcare is very complex as the employees’ behavior is directly correlated with the patient’s satisfaction. During the outbreak of COVID-19, it became increasingly important to recognize the patient’s satisfaction criteria regarding how hospitals serve the patients. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the HRP on the patients’ satisfaction during the outbreak of an imminent pandemic, like COVID-19. For this purpose, we developed two contrasting samples: private hospitals’ directors (n = 85) and private hospitals’ patients (n = 858). We used structural equation modeling to assess the links between human resource planning and the patients’ satisfaction with the quality of care. In fact, our careful review of the literature provides us with a deep discussion on the practices of human resource planning. The results showed that some human resource planning practices are positively related to the patients’ satisfaction while others are negatively related.