M.P.H.(Health Policy and Management), Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, 2008 / The provision of rehabilitation services has received little attention within the context of health sector reforms in South Africa. This study explores the human resource (HR) management component of the National Rehabilitation Policy (NRP), formulated to improve access to rehabilitation services within the public health sector. Qualitative methodology was used to understand the alignment of policy to practice, with data derived from both the deductive approach (document reviews); and inductive approach (key informant interviews and focus group discussions). The findings reveal that there is a gap between policy and practice. Resistance to integration, problems with professional identity and capacity constraints at national, provincial and local levels hindered the implementation of an integrated rehabilitation service. In addition, polices and norms and standards that aim to guide HR in public health are not coherent. These directly influence HR performance, and have served to highlight the social and institutional phenomena impacting on service delivery.

Employee absenteeism is a global management problem that affects organizational productivity, profits, justice, and employee motivation. A Zambian government agency has little knowledge about absenteeism and the lived experiences of clients regarding staff absenteeism and service delivery. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore employee absenteeism and service delivery through the lens of McGregor's theory x. The research question was about the lived experiences of the agency's clients regarding absenteeism and service delivery. The data were collected through semistructured interviews of 22 purposefully selected clients of the Zambian government agency and were analyzed using the van Kaam method. Findings indicated that health issues of staff and relatives, funerals, alcoholism, demotivation, lack of staff transport, chronic fatigue, staff shortages, poor working conditions and salaries, poor supervision, school runs, laziness and indiscipline, and the transfer of staff affected absenteeism. Absenteeism caused organizational financial losses, inefficiency, reduced productivity, delayed service delivery, damaged the organization's reputation, and created client stress, frustration, and hopelessness. Absenteeism can be significantly reduced by close collaboration between the managers and their subordinates through increased employee engagement, improved incentive rewards programs, and a better understanding of the effects of work-€related stress. Positive social change through the reduction of absenteeism in government agencies can enhance the quality of public services in critical public sectors such as education, health, social welfare, labor, and agriculture.

Thesis (M.Dev) --University of Limpopo, 2011

Thesis (MPA) --University of Limpopo, 2013 / The study deals with the implementation of the Batho Pele principles in the Greater Tzaneen Local Municipality. Literature review was conducted as a secondary source of information and primary information was collected from a sample of 23 respondents. The study used qualitative (semi-structured questionnaire, observation and document analysis) in data collection and analysis. The findings revealed that the root causes of the challenges and the challenges themselves that the Greater Tzaneen Local Municipality is facing, are mainly internal and include the following: Low morale, budget constraints, lack of enforcement of the Batho Pele principles by both employees and their supervisors, poor employee attitudes, unwillingness to improve towards service delivery, lack of monthly and quarterly meetings where review of all programmes and projects is done. Instead review is done at the end of the year, shortage of human resource in the Community Services Directorate to effectively and efficiently implement systems, lack of sufficient performance incentives to reward those who perform well or exceed the set performance target or halo effect, focusing on the quantity of the end-product (output) rather than on the quality.

Thesis (MPA.) --University of Limpopo, 2013 / The importance of achieving governmental goals within the spheres of government is a valuable dimension of service delivery through which communities realise the fulfilment of promises made by government. The strategic management process is one of the tools to be used to achieve governmental goals. This study shows the importance of using strategic management process in achieving governmental goals: A case study of Limpopo Department of Agriculture. The problems and challenges identified during the process are highlighted for probing. There is a need for the department to acknowledge and recognise the strategic management function by fully utilising the process thereof in order to see its positive contribution to service delivery. The following areas were investigated by the researcher; demographics profile of therespondents; the challenges in the development, implementation and evaluation of strategy; the importance of proper management of strategy; the role of strategy in achieving governmental goals, the mechanisms of communicating departmental strategies. The collected data was categorised into themes and subthemes to accommodate proper analysis and interpretation. In conclusion the study gave recommendations on how strategic management processes can be improved through proper consultations both internally and externally, effective communication processes, and bottom-up approach as part of the consultation processes. It also indicated the importance of management team taking ownership of the strategic management processes. However, the recommendations given are not cast in stone towards improving strategic management process. The senior management team of Limpopo Department of Agriculture should consider recommendations in this study together with other solutions to improve service delivery to the citizens of Limpopo in the agricultural sector.

This study reports the characteristics of home visitor training based on the results of a national survey of nominated best practice home visiting programs that service children with disabilities and their families. Two hundred thirty-six programs were nominated by their state's director of Maternal-Child Health and/or their state's Part H Coordinator as community-based programs that have had success integrating home visiting services into their community's overall system of care for children eligible for Part H services and/or special health care needs. The return rate of the survey was 85%, and these 193 programs serve as the basis for this study. Results include information on topic areas on which home visitors received preservice and inservice training (i.e., atypical child development, community-based services, cultural competence), the amount of training home visitors received (i.e., hours of preservice and inservice training), and how training practices compare to what experts in the field view as recommended practices. The results indicate that the majority of program directors provided their home visitors with preservice and inservice training. The results also suggest that agencies that only employed professional home visitors tended to provide more training than those agencies employing only paraprofessionals. The results of this study indicate that a program's model of service delivery did not predict the amount or type of training home visitors received. The discussion includes recommendations that are offered to directors of home visiting programs.

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No description available.

Aim: Nowadays, China‟s hotel industry has developed rapidly and makes a great contribution to service industry. Nevertheless, there are still various problems in the hotel industry. There is a lack of suitable human resource strategies to develop employees qualitatively and quantitatively, which is the main internal reason. Therefore, with the evaluation of whether the Haibin Hotel and Westin Hotel are aware of the importance of the employees in service delivery and research on how the two hotels develop people to deliver excellent service through human resource strategies, which ultimately reveal that service personnel is playing an extremely important role on excellent service delivery in this paper.   Method: This paper investigates Haibin Hotel and Westin Hotel as multiple case studies to study the human resource strategies for delivering service quality through people. In order to examine the validity of previous relevant theories hence put forward the developed theory of service quality delivery chain through collecting and analysing data from telephone interview with managers and survey employees through questionnaires in both hotels.   Result & Conclusions: With researching the human resource strategies for improving the employees' quality and quantity, and comparing the differences in service delivery through people in both hotels, we conclude that hotels should highlight that the service employees' play an extremely important role on good service delivery as well as specially emphasize on the service quality delivery through integrating the service culture and human resource strategies into the hotels.   Suggestions for future research: One limitation is a lack of customer perception on service delivery. Another limitation is in the telephone interview which cannot yield complete information about the hotel. Two suggestions for further research have been put forward in this paper. One is to conduct more than three case studies that can make the data more rich and effective if the time allowed. Another is adopting face-to-face interviews to collect the qualitative data.   Contribution of the thesis: This paper reveals how the important role of employees in service quality delivery and come up with a developed theory could be applicable to other hotels and provide the guideline for other hotels to improve the service quality delivery.

While service and support delivery for youth and families has been a priority within education in Saskatchewan for the past thirty years, educators and schools struggle to respond to the changing and often complex needs of students and families today.<p> The primary purpose of this study was to formulate a conceptual framework to explore the construct of social capital and the variables affecting social capital creation, acquisition and mobility. My secondary purpose was to then use network inquiry to investigate how networks of relations in a school community could be invested in and utilized to increase sources of social capital in an educational context for educators, students and families. As both an interpretive qualitative study and a critical qualitative study, this dissertation used focus groups to explore the experiences and sense-making of 16 participants in an educational setting to answer questions regarding social capital.<p> Having used network inquiry to investigate existing levels of social capital in a school community and the opportunities for social capital growth, the findings affirm the potential of network inquiry to contribute to the discourse on service delivery in schools. Furthermore, by identifying the academic and non-academic variables that contributed to successful collaborative partnerships and the determinants for increased capacity, process is emphasized before outcome, which holds potential for promising practices. Finally, because this study was conducted in an educational context, this may help policy makers to provide a framework to investigate processes for optimum service delivery and to frame educational policies for improved outcomes for youth and families.