Article
Strategic Talent Management and Healthcare Excellence: Exploring the Role of Human Resource Practices in Sustainable Service Delivery
Healthcare organizations depend on human capital to an unusually high degree relative to most other service sectors, since the clinical quality, safety, and continuity of care a hospital or health system delivers is produced almost entirely through the skill, judgment, and sustained engagement of its clinical and administrative workforce rather than through capital equipment or process automation alone. This paper reviews the strategic human resource management (SHRM) and talent management literature as it applies specifically to healthcare organizations, synthesizing the resource-based view of the firm, the high-performance work systems and AMO (ability-motivation-opportunity) framework underlying the broader HRM-performance link, and the healthcare-specific empirical literature connecting nurse staffing levels, workforce engagement, and human resource practice bundles to measured patient safety, mortality, and service-quality outcomes. Particular attention is given to why healthcare's specific organizational features, high-stakes clinical decision-making, chronic workforce shortages, and a historically fragmented, professionally siloed management structure, make sustainable service delivery especially dependent on deliberate, strategically integrated talent management rather than administratively separate personnel functions. Distinct comparative tables map core human resource practice bundles onto their documented healthcare outcome, contrast talent management approaches across acute, workforce-shortage, and high-turnover healthcare contexts, and set specific healthcare service-delivery challenges against the human resource interventions the reviewed evidence associates with addressing each. The paper concludes that sustainable healthcare service delivery depends on treating talent management as a clinically consequential strategic function integrated with quality and safety governance, rather than as an administratively separate support service, and identifies longitudinal, outcome-linked evaluation of integrated talent management interventions as the central future research prospect.