Our Premier, Honourable Senzo Mchunu,
It is with great pride that today we launch our first ever KwaZulu-Natal Departments’ Annual Service Excellence Awards. We have thought it wise that we give recognition and reward for performance excellence. We see this as one of the greatest motivators for employees, especially in a highly challenging environment such as the public health sector.
The Department of Health is a very complex entity that is involved in a wide variety of activities. It is laden with the high staff attrition, the inability to retain professional health care workers, the negative publicity and the overload due to high vacancies; all these contribute to demotivated and dejected personnel corps.
As means to bring back the passion into the work place; to rekindle the calling and re-affirm the reason to be part of the Department of Health, we have thus decided to introduce some form of recognition and rewards for service excellence.
At the present moment, the department receives a few accolades/awards through participation in various provincial, national or other competitions. These awards serve to motivate the recipients, the health facility and the department as a whole. Being of the nature that it is and dealing with patients on a daily basis, there is much emphasis on the things that go wrong and very little is said or done to acknowledge the good things, the excellent performers and the best practices that prevail in certain areas.
The departmental annual awards are therefore aimed to serve as the mechanism to promote healthy competition amongst personnel/health facilities in order to motivate them to perform better as we go forward.
Approach - how the awards will work?
We envisage a situation where there will be an Awards Committee, possibly chaired by a Senior General Manager. This Committee would be a multidisciplinary Committee so that they can be in a position to deal with all types of awards – both clinical and non-clinical.
The Awards Committee will determine the Terms of Reference for the role and responsibility of the Committee.
Categories of awards would for example be:
- Individual awards - such as Best Nurse, Most Innovative Doctor, Best Financial Manager etc.
- Group awards – for specific units/facilities/disciplines etc.
- Best Practice awards – for innovation, unprecedented activities which yield excellent health outcomes, etc.
Type of awards
There would be various types of awards that would be considered, for example: Monetary award in the form of a once-off bonus:
- Award of a bursary to study in a particular field, without having to compete for such a bursary
- Study tour abroad to enhance skills and competencies
- Trophies/plaques
- Certificates and gifts.
Hon Premier, with this concept of annual awards intended to recognize and reward personnel /facilities/disciplines/units/groups for service excellence, we indeed hope to boost the morale of staff as a whole, motivate others to perform better and instil a feeling of pride amongst staff.
Its spin offs will be an enhanced service delivery, patient satisfaction and reduction in negative publicity, adverse incidents and ultimately result in better health outcomes, which is one of the imperatives of the public health sector.
A suggested theme for the first in a series of annual awards could be:
“Rekindling the passion for service excellence!”
I thank you!
