Human Resources Challenges in Health Care Providers Units during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Identification, Solutions, and Consequences

The spread of Covid-19 disease in the country and the increase in the number of patients led to an increase in the workload of staff, apathy, fatigue, and leaving the medical staff, which eventually led to a shortage of medical staff and challenges in manpower in hospitals. Therefore, by using the experiences of managers in identifying challenges related to human resources and solving the problems can be appropriate in order to modify the challenge related to human resources in hospitals for providing medical services to patients with Covid-19.

The present applied study was a qualitative study conducted among 31 international, national, and domestic managers who had specialized in hospital management. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and analysed by thematic analysis, using MAXQDA.

Based on the analysis of qualitative interviews, the most important challenges related to human resources were: “stress and staff fears of contracting the virus in hospitals”, “existence of resistance in personnel against unexpected changes”, “increase staff workload”, “lack of specialized manpower”, “reluctance of some forces to be present at work in the early days of the disease”, “psychological issues in the treatment team.

Given the challenges, the existence of well-planned and pre-determined planning, as well as the importance of manpower in planning for crisis management during epidemics plays an important role.