The August special issue of ILR Review is now available and open to access for the next 30 days! Included in the special issue on Work and Employment Relations in Health Care are papers that discuss the relationship between nurse unions and patient outcomes, the effect of electronic health record adoption on physician productivity, and the impact nurse staffing strategies have on patient satisfaction. In the introductory editorial essay, Ariel C. Avgar, Adrienne E. Eaton, Rebecca Kolins Givan, and Adam Seth Litwin outline the problems inherent in US health care, most notably the fact that despite outspending other countries on health care costs per capita, the US demonstrates above-average rates of medical errors and below-average life expectancies. As the health care system moves toward reform, the authors argue for careful consideration of how workplace dynamics impact the outcomes for everyone involved in health care. The editorial thus highlights the importance of research on work and employment relations in the health care industry:
This special issue of the ILR Review is designed to showcase the central role that work organization and employment relations play in shaping important outcomes such as the quality of care and organizational performance. Each of the articles included in this special issue makes an important contribution to our understanding of the large and rapidly changing health care sector. Specifically, these articles provide novel
empirical evidence about the relationship between organizations, institutions, and work practices and a wide array of central outcomes across different levels of analysis. This breadth is especially important because the health care literature has largely neglected employment-related factors in explaining organizational and worker outcomes in this industry. Individually, these articles shed new light on the role that health information technologies play in affecting patient care and productivity (see Hitt and Tambe; Meyerhoefer et al.); the relationship between work practices and organizational reliability (Vogus and Iacobucci); staffing practices, processes, and outcomes (Kramer and Son; Hockenberry and Becker; Kossek et al.); health care unions’ effects on the quality of patient care (Arindrajit, Kaplan, and Thompson); and the relationship between the quality of jobs and the quality of care (Burns, Hyde, and Killet). Below, we position the articles in this special issue against the backdrop of the pressures and challenges facing the industry and the organizations operating within it. We highlight the implications that organizational responses to industry pressures have had for organizations, the patients they care for, and the employees who deliver this care.
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