Appropriate resource utilization is an important aspect in nursing. The process entails finding the optimal methods that would save resources and achieve the expected healthcare outcome in various areas, including ctherapy, medical procedures, and treatment techniques. It also involves proper use of medical technologies to avoid wastage. One of the resource utilization issues that must be considered when developing a proposal is costing of nursing as a resource, since it constitutes 75% of total hospital costs. Important resources related to nursing are hours of nursing care and nurses’ wages. The monthly total of nursing hours and labor costs for nursing are categorized into per patient nursing hours and per patient nursing costs ( Welton & Harper, 2017). Hence, it is important to examine how nursing care is offered to each patient and to measure the total costs of the provided care in relation to the outcomes.
Secondly, financial management skills of nursing managers should be considered when developing a nursing program proposal. Notably, nurses influence decisions in healthcare and advocate for effective resource allocation. Financial competency assists nurse leaders to maintain high standards since they are responsible for some level of financial management, such as analyzing financial statements, business models articulation, management of financial resources as well as educating nurses on application of financial knowledge (Noh & Lim, 2015). Therefore, to meet such standards, financial management education for nurse managers and nurses should be enhanced.
A third resource utilization issue that arises is capacity development of faculty entrusted to train and prepare nurses. This entails a process in which the faculty obtains, improves, and maintains the knowledge and skills required for training and guiding nursing students. Notably, effectiveness of the nursing program can only be achieved through development of the competencies of leaders (Kang, Ho, & Nguyen, 2018, p. 2). Hence, nursing programs are influenced by effective leadership and and resource capacity.
Fiscal and Resources Available
Resources can limitthe achievement of effective and efficient services.
Health care resources include personnel, supplies, drugs, funds, facilities and equipment used in healthcare services provision (Olson, 2017, p. 321). Fiscal resources can be categorized into three groups. The first group is environmental resources, which comprise the physical rooms and space in the facilities and their costs, such as air conditioning, electricity, and heating systems. The second part is equipment resources, which include audiovisual equipments, machinery, training supplies, and computers among others facilities. While the third group contain personnel resources that entails part time and full time staff, fringe benefits, taxes, insurance, and compensation among other aspects (Williams & Wilkins, 2019). Since resources are scarceproper utilization and allocation should be enahnced.
Nurse staffing is the most vital resource, which t constitutes the highest cost proportion within the health sector since health is labor intensive. Unfortunately many countries in the world are facing shortage in nurse staffing, leading to increase in operating costs of health centers, which ultimately affect the quality of care. (Heydari, Najar & Bakhshi, 2015). Therefore, effective utilization of resources available has major financial impact.
Strategic decisions a nursing leader should consider while developing a nursing program proposal in terms of resource utilization and its reasons
Resource utilization should be strategic considering that healthcare resources are scarce. Resource utilization can be categorized into policy level, the organizational level, and micro allocation strategies. Within the health centers, resource utilization strategy decisions are based on policies, protocols, and clinical practice, while micro-allocation strategies involve decision-making by nurses to investigate when distribution strategies are not in place (Olsson & Ransom, 2017, p. 321). Therefore nursing leaders are involved in strategic decision making at the organizational level, and supervise nurses when developing micro allocation strategies.
Medical resources need proper management to control overall hospital costs. It is vital to note that management of these resources is the responsibility of all staff in the health facilities, including nurses , under supervision of nursing leaders. Therefore, an organizational culture needs to be developed within the hospital in a way that nurse leaders and nurses develop a sense of futurism in usage of resources (Heydari, Najar, & Bakhshi, 2015). Such initiative is possible if financial education is incorporated in nursing programs.
Some practices within the health centers are detrimental to efficient resource utilization. For example, whendrugs are stored for long they can end up expiring. Therefore, nursing leaders should learn inventory management and the financial processes to teach the other personnel to avoid some of these practices as well make strategic decisions on procurement of supplies. The learning should be accompanied by designing and implementing a supply chain strategy that is systematic to ensure that hospitals access quality supplies with the right quantities. Hence some of the strategies that nursing managers should consider to enhance proper resources utilization and management may include monitoring performance of other nursing staff on their usage of resources, training the nurses on protection and maintenance of hospital equipment, learning about equipment and supplies prices, and being careful on usage of equipments and supplies (Heydari, Najar & Bakhshi, 2015). Implementation of these strategies is expected to reduce costs of health facilities and improve quality of care.
How can nursing leaders track the impact of these strategic decisions monthly as well as yearly? What tools are available to nursing leaders to track the impact of these strategies?
Tracking the impact of strategic decisions is vital in ensuring that outcomes are desirable, strengths are appreciated, and limitations are addressed. One of the ways that nursing leaders can do this is through auditing and monitoring the usage of resources as a process of controlling costs. Nurse executives should learn accounting systems to manage the cost and for effective monitorsupplies and equipment usage. While monitoring can be conducted monthly, the main audit should be done yearly (Heydari, Najar, & Bakhshi, 2015). Hence, those processes should identify possible problems in resource utilization within the centers.
Some of the tools used by nursing leaders may include resource management software that tracks information, such as skills and availability of nursing staff. However, the data in the software might be limited or fail to obtain some vital resources, especially indirect resource utilization, which is necessary in the resource evaluations. Hence, in such cases, the nurse leaders can obtain the information empirically by using self-reported questionnaires, interviews from other staff, observation such as physical stock count among other approaches ( Leggett et al., 2016, p. 1). The process, can be done monthly at a smaller scale and a major evaluation can be conducted yearly. Analyzing information periodically will identify possible failures in resource utilization and hence, suggest a remedy.
References
Heydri, A., Najar, A., & Bakshi, M. (2015). Resource management among intensive care nurses: An ethnographic study. Materia Sociomedica, 27 (6), 390-394. doi:10.5455/msm.2015.27.390-394
Kang, S., Ho, T., & Nguyen. T. (2018).Capacity development in an undergraduate nursing program in Vietnam. Frontiers in Public Health, 6,1-8. doi:10.3389/fpubh.2018.00146
Leggett, L., Khadaroo, R., Leduc, J., Lorenzetti, D., Hanson, H., Wagg, A., Panwal, R., & Clement, F. (2016). Measuring resource utilization. Medicine Baltimore, 95(10), 1-8. doi:10.1097/MD.0000000000002759
Noh, W., & Lim, y. (2015). Nurses educational needs assessment for financial management education using nominal group technique. Asian Nursing Research, 9 (2), 152-157. doi:10.1016/j.anr.2015.04.004
Olsson, J., & Ransom, H. (2017). Allocation of health care resources: Principles for decision-making. Pediatrics in review, 38 (7), 320-329. doi: 10.1542/pir.2016-0012
Welton, J., & Harper, E. (2017). Nursing care value-based financial models. Nursing Economics, 33 (1), 14-19.
Williams, L., & Wilkins, W. (2019). Managing fiscal resources. Journal for Nurses in Professional Development, 35 (1), 39-40. doi:10.1097/NND.0000000000000502
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