Accounting and reporting for human capital in a public healthcare organization: do they promote effective human capital management to achieve social sustainability?

Increasing research on public sector organizations’ (PSOs) non-financial reporting has shown how these organizations rely on a high variety of non-financial reporting tools to disclose non-financial information (Manes-Rossi et al., 2020). Non-financial information relevant to external and internal stakeholders can include, as a matter of example, environmental and social sustainability and intellectual capital (Kaur and Lodhia, 2019). Although scholars show an increased interest to investigate non-financial reporting in PSOs, there is a lack of studies, related to the public sector, examining the link of non-financial reporting with management control and decision-making functions, as well as on the motivations and factors that support non-financial reports’ implementation (Manes-Rossi et al., 2020; Fusco and Ricci, 2018). When it comes to sustainability, many have called for the study of PSOs’ contribution to the achievement of SDGs, through sustainability accounting and reporting practices (Kaur and Lodhia, 2019). In this regard, studies emphasizing the link between intellectual capital (IC) and sustainability within non-financial reporting tools are still scant (i.e. Farneti et al., 2019), even while being highly encouraged, as IC is a potential enabler of value creation within organizations (Zambon et al., 2019; de Villiers and Sharma, 2020). Among the dimensions of IC, human capital has been an object of special emphasis concerning sustainable value creation and its reporting (de Villiers and Sharma, 2020). As Ehnert (2016, p. 90) argues Sustainable human resource management (SHRM) can be defined as the adoption of HRM strategies and practices that enable the achievement of financial, social and ecological goals, with an impact inside and outside of the organisation and over a long-term time horizon while controlling for unintended side effects and negative feedback. Based on the perspective of human capital, implementing sustainable human capital practices is aimed at taking actions to pursue “developing mutually beneficial and regenerative relationships between internal and external resource providers (e.g. employees, their families, education systems, natural environment)” (Ehnert et al., 2016, p. 90). From a practical viewpoint, to what extent human capital management (as part of IC) contributes to sustainability within healthcare organizations is of interest (Cavicchi et al., 2022). Nevertheless, research in this field has mainly addressed dimensions such as financial sustainability and quality of care for patients, or environmental sustainability of healthcare facilities, leaving social sustainability quite unexplored, especially considering the organizational dimension of social sustainability (Paparatto et al., 2023). Sustainability regarding the healthcare services’ human capital has recently reached the attention of scholars, due to the COVID-19 pandemic that strongly impacted the physical and psychological health of healthcare professionals (Walton-Roberts, 2021; Brolan et al., 2022). In this regard, work–life balance was one of the main problems of unsustainability that emerged with the pandemic. From a managerial viewpoint, scholars have called to study accounting and reporting in public healthcare organizations in times of crisis (Sargiacomo, 2015), such as the COVID-19 pandemic, to a) understand their capacity to provide effective solutions, and b) to inform sustainability decisions (Grossi et al., 2020; Rinaldi et al., 2020, Rinaldi, 2022). Addressing the call of scholars, this chapter focuses on action research developed to recount the pandemic’s impact on Italian public local health authority (LHA) professionals, to inform sustainable human capital practices, especially concerning gender equality, which was one of the main dimensions of unsustainability emerging from COVID-19.