What a deviation report taught me about wards

At the sterile plant where I worked in 2000, a deviation report could be closed with two words: human error. I read dozens of them as the training coordinator, and many described an operator who had shortened a gowning step during a night shift with two colleagues missing. The report retrained the operator. It rarely asked why the shift was short. I learnt there that a training record can be complete while the system around it is failing, and that people stop reporting small slips once a report mainly decides whom to retrain.

I grew up in the Pinzgau, south of Salzburg, and completed a master's degree in social and economic sciences at the University of Arlenburg in June 1996. My first post, from that September, was in the personnel office of Tauerwald District Hospital, a public hospital of about 520 staff. I calculated night and weekend allowances, kept employment files and prepared working-time reports for the works council. Watching ward sisters rebuild rosters by telephone every Friday afternoon gave me an early respect for the practical labour of staffing a ward.

In July 1999 I moved to Bavaria and joined Steinhövel Pharma, a family-owned maker of sterile eye drops and small-volume injectables. I coordinated GMP training for production and quality staff, working beside the head of quality assurance and the Qualified Person who certified each batch. We replaced read-and-sign exercises with observed practice, and we redesigned operator qualification so that an aseptic process simulation tested the team as well as the individual. From 2003 I was the human resources business partner for production and quality. The works council and I spent eleven months negotiating a three-shift system for the cleanroom lines in 2006; the agreement lasted because operators could see their shifts a quarter ahead.

Healthcare drew me back in September 2008, when I became head of human resources at Amperwies Private Hospital, an acute and orthopaedic hospital of 640 staff north of Munich. Nurse vacancies there were the central business risk. I set up the hospital's first structured route for nurses qualified abroad, working through recognition with the responsible state authority and arranging adaptation placements. I also saw how quickly an experienced nurse moves from tiredness to exhaustion when the roster is rewritten every week.

Zirbenau recruited me in March 2014 as human resources director for its Bavarian clinics, then three sites with 960 staff. Rehabilitation differs from acute care: patients stay three or four weeks, and their progress depends on therapists, nurses and physicians working to one plan. Physiotherapists and occupational therapists are as scarce as nurses, and a clinic that loses two of them must either shorten every patient's therapy timetable or stop admitting. I integrated an orthopaedic clinic acquired in 2017 and harmonised its company agreement with its works council rather than imposing ours.

I became group chief human resources officer in April 2019. Since 2021 I have also represented the shareholder on the supervisory board of Zirbenau Kliniken Bayern, where employee representatives hold one third of the seats. Working across two countries means two works-constitution laws, two collective-agreement systems and two routes to recognising foreign qualifications. I have found it more useful to explain each difference to our board than to bury it in a group average.

The three cases I describe concern promises that clinics often break without announcing it. We paid a premium each time a rostered day off was cancelled and closed beds to staff a float pool. We ended an overseas recruitment contract after learning that its candidates carried debts, and paid our own care assistants to complete recognition as nurses. We raised therapists' grades after a job evaluation showed them paid below comparable technicians. Each decision had opponents with sound reasons, and I record them.

I am deliberately patient with works councils. In both countries their agreement is needed for many arrangements that matter most to staff, and I would rather reach a settlement that survives the next shortage than win a vote I must repeat. Inside my own team, I expect every human resources manager to know their clinics' absence, vacancy and overtime figures as well as a ward manager does.

I am now looking for a first independent supervisory board seat. I can offer experience of co-determined workforce decisions in regulated manufacturing and healthcare. I would need to learn a new company's commercial and technical questions, and I would expect to listen before I offered conclusions. My strongest qualification for that seat is not a programme I have launched but the habit of asking what a staffing decision costs the people who carry it out.

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