Project: New Strategies to Improve Health Professionals’ Recruitment and Retention
Amélie Roux, MPP, is a 2024–25 French Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice. She is currently the Director of General Affairs and Communications at Hospices Civils de Lyon, France's second-largest university hospital group, comprising 13 hospitals and over 24,000 health care professionals. Roux is dedicated to serving the public interest and improving access to care to the best of her ability. Through her previous experience as Deputy Director of Human Resources at the University Hospital of Tours and Head of the Hospital Human Resources Department at the French Hospital Federation (FHF), she has shown a particular interest in human resources in the health care sector. Roux has developed both an empirical vision of the various dimensions of HR, reinforced by her work with numerous hospitals to identify and promote best practices, and a more global and structural approach, by representing public hospitals in national labor relations and by developing national HR-related laws and regulations as promoted by the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Civil Service.
After graduating with a master’s in public policy from Sciences Po (Institut des Sciences Politiques de Paris), Roux completed the health care institution management program of the French School of Public Health (École des hautes études en santé publique, or EHESP).
Project overview: A qualified, diverse, and committed health care workforce is vital for the promotion of equal access to care for all. French and American hospitals, while functioning within profoundly different health care systems, face similar challenges in recruiting health care professionals and experiencing workforce shortages. They face a growing demand for care services due to an aging population, evolving medical techniques, and new generations of workers who are more concerned with work–life balance, work environment, and individual recognition. Yet having a sufficient and qualified workforce is essential to providing quality care for all. Therefore, this research project proposes to address the following question: What innovative human resources and communication strategies can meet health professionals’ aspirations to improve their recruitment and retention in hospitals and reinforce their professional commitment?
The project is designed to explore health professionals’ aspirations and job satisfaction, their own expectations for their careers, and the expectations of their employers, and to examine these in the light of current hospitals’ human resources strategies. To do so, I propose to analyze the HR policies of case-study American hospitals through quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews with health care professionals. Based on these results and descriptive statistics, my goal is to help design and experiment with new concrete strategies for individual hospitals to better address this issue and to formulate systemic proposals for the authorities in charge of regulating and monitoring the demography of health professionals.