Ramesh Bhat, MCom, PhD, Finance and Accounting, Indian Institute of Management, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad, India and Sunil K Maheshwari, BTech, FPM, Personnel and Industrial Relations, Indian Institute of Management, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad, India, +91-79-26324806, sunilm@iimahd.ernet.in.

The purpose of this presentation is to show how human resource management practices are linked to professional and organizational commitment and its implications on health reforms. Given the growing complexities and challenges the health sector faces, reforms in this sector are inevitable. Often health sector reforms aim to address many of these deficiencies and ensuring effectiveness and efficiency of resource use, they focus on making the health systems responsive through strengthening financial systems, ensuring local participation and public private partnerships, and autonomy of health facilities. The reform process, among other things, intrinsically makes some fundamental assumptions some of which are as follows: high organisational commitment of health care providers, high professional commitment of health care providers, and adequate skills of healthcare providers. This paper examines the commitment of district level health officials in the newly carved out state of Chhattisgarh in India. Since development oriented HR practices (HRD) are powerful tools to commit people working in health sector to enhance the quality of care, we believe that health sector reforms will have to concentrate on human resource issues and practices more than ever before in near future. The presentation will address the following questions: (i) what is status of professional commitment, organisational commitment and technical competencies of health officials? (ii) what are the characteristics of human resource management practices in the health sector in the state? (iii) how these management practices are linked with professional and organizational commitment? Finally the presentation discusses the implications of these on healthcare reforms.

Learning Objectives:

• By the end of the presentation, participants will be able to
• 1.Describe the linkage between human resource management practices and organizational and professional commitment
• 2.Develop human resource systems to enhance commitment of health professionals.
• 3.Discuss human resource issues within the context of health sector reform process in developing countries.

Keywords: Health Care Reform, Organizational Change

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.