Performance Appraisal In Nursing Writing Assignment

Despite costs associated with performance appraisal, it is one way health care organizations can ensure that only competent, qualified nursing personnel care for patients. Some management experts have recommended that performance appraisals be eliminated from the work setting. Based on scholarly journals/publications, do you feel that  they should  be eliminated, altered, or continued in a different format?  Support your position with at least 2 recent (less than 5 years old) cited sources, preferably from Nursing journal articles.

Do you agree with these experts? Why or why not? Be specific.

Remember this is scholarly writing and not a venue for your personal opinion. Support your assertions with evidence from recent, scholarly, peer-reviewed journals (preferably nursing journals). ( To reiterate, “recent” is less than five years old.) Remember, your textbook is not a journal.

This assignment should be submitted in a Word document in APA format including citations in text and on the reference page. The body of the paper should be 2-3 pages,excluding the cover page and reference list. You may only submit one file and no late submissions will be accepted.

SOLUTION

Performance appraisal in healthcare as argued by Kahya & Oral (2018) plays a significant role in ensuring that healthcare achieves the desired patient outcome. In today’s healthcare, the focus is on offering patient-centred care to ensure the needs of the patients are met. To ensure that health care practitioners adhere to offering quality healthcare, there is a need to assess their performance through performance appraisals. However, while the healthcare organizations have different organisational context, access to facilities, different motivating methods among other issues, they are appraised in the same manner thus resulting in subjective results. However, the search for a universal tool to assess healthcare providers’ performance remains a concern. As explained by Nikpeyma et al. (2014), the performance appraisal system for nurses is confronted with various problems such as structure, process and results and thus needs to be changed and revised to achieve high quality care. This paper agrees with Nikpeyma et al. (2014) that rather than eliminating[cmppp_restricted] performance appraisal in nursing, the system should be altered to ensure that it meets its goal.

Aly & El-Shanawany (2016) argue that satisfaction with performance appraisals is significant in ensuring that nurses are motivated thus helping them achieve better outcomes. In the last decade, performance appraisal has been used to guide career development in healthcare. It has also been used as a strategic tool for increasing success and effectiveness in healthcare organizations. In hospitals, the focus of performance appraisal is to monitor how healthcare providers perform which in turn motivates the care providers and improve the quality of care. Performance appraisal is also a significant factor in the functioning of management and human resource in that such appraisals are used in making managerial decisions including personal research, personal development, resource planning and other purposes (Aly & El-Shanawany, 2016). The information acquired through appraisals also informs the hiring process, talent management, career development, motivating employees and employee rewarding.

In general terms, performance appraisals not only in healthcare but also in other industries are used as a tool to effectively manage the performance of the employees as well as the organization. Without performance appraisals in healthcare, it would be hard to identify the care providers who are qualified and competent to take care of patients. It is thus important for organizations to ensure that the healthcare providers are satisfied with the process and tools used in performance appraisals. If healthcare providers are unsatisfied with the results or the process of performance appraisals, they lack the motivation, and lack of motivation is commonly related to poor performance (Aly & El-Shanawany, 2016). One of the major problems why healthcare providers commonly favor the elimination of performance appraisals is because they are dissatisfied with the results or the process. Which indicates that rather than eliminating performance appraisals, effective tools and processes should be employed to ensure the results are motivating to the employees and achieve the intended purposes.

Nikpeyma et al. (2014), performance appraisal does not increase productivity always. At times the appraisal can be biased, inaccurate and may not be accepted by the users. In some occasions, performance appraisals have been linked to dissatisfaction, resistance on employer and lack of motivation. This is caused by errors in the evaluation content, disharmony in employee needs, absence of clear appraisal elements, disharmony between employees and biases evaluation among others. Nikpeyma et al. (2014), identified several problems that cause conflicts in performance appraisal. These include poor organizational context, subjective appraisal where the tools used fail to clearly identify how the rating is done and the inefficiency of organisations to introducing regulations. When evaluation scores are general, nurse re not oriented effectively thus unaware of hospital standards, objectives, expectations and duties, lack of appropriate facilities, and failure to be motivated through different methods leads to poor performance.

As argued by Kahya & Oral (2018), though professional and clinical skills have higher importance when appraising performance, the best tool to measure performance is one that includes the contextual items. The organizational context is important in identifying access to facilities and resources. As argued earlier, health organizations have different access to resources and facilities which might affect their performance differently. Thus, when employees are appraised without considering the context, then the results may portray a disheartening picture as compared to others (Kahya & Oral, 2018). However, this does not mean that clinical and professional skills should be ignored rather the appraisal should be done systematically. Thus, performance appraisal is not a waste of resources in that not is a strategic tool employed not only in planning but in making effective decisions. As identified in this paper, the problem is not the presence of performance appraisals, rather the process, systems and tools employed in system appraisals. Eliminating performance appraisals can be detrimental in increasing the quality of healthcare, but again, they can also act as demotivates. Thus, the solution is to alter performance appraisal to ensure that it meets the expectations of both the employees and the organizations.

References

Aly, N. A. E. F. M., & El-Shanawany, S. M. (2016). The Influence Of Performance Appraisal Satisfaction On Nurses’ Motivation And Their Work Outcomes In Critical Care And Toxicology Units. European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 12(20).

Kahya, E., & Oral, N. (2018). Measurement of clinical nurse performance: Developing a tool including contextual items. Journal of Nursing Education and Practice, 8(6), 112.

Nikpeyma, N., Abed_Saeedi, Z., Azargashb, E., & Alavi_Majd, H. (2014). Problems of clinical nurse performance appraisal system: A qualitative study. Asian Nursing Research, 8(1), 15-22. [/cmppp_restricted]