ECO 605 Assignment 7.1: Calculating Personnel Hours
Introduction
In this assignment, you will calculate and interpret personnel hours for a hospital unit. Use the
to record your responses.
Table 7.1 provides personnel numbers for a unit in a hospital.
Table 7.1
| Categories of Work Hours | Number of Hours |
|---|---|
| Direct hours | 3,108 |
| Indirect hours | 928 |
| Non-productive hours | 760 |
| UOS or HPPD | 436 |
| Survey period | 14 |
Assignment Guidelines
Part One:
Use the provided data in table 7.1 to calculate and interpret in writing the following figures for the unit:
- Total worked (or productive) hours
- Total paid hours
- Total direct hours (or variable) worked per UOS or HPPD
- Total indirect (or fixed) worked hours per UOS or HPPD
- Total worked (or productive hours) per UOS or HPPD
- Total paid hours per UOS or HPPD
- Average daily UOS
Part Two:
Assume a hospital unit records 2,036 full-time hours and 326 part-time hours within one week. How many full-time equivalents (FTE’s) does this unit have?
Explain what happens to the supply curve for an output-maximizing firm if it increases the quality of their visits.
Submission
Your document should be named using the following convention: Last name_First name_Assignment_7.1
Submit your assignment and review full grading criteria on the page.
Discussion 7.1
I work in an intensive care unit at a medium sized hospital in a mid-sized town. There are a half dozen larger hospitals within a four hour drive or two hour flight from my home hospital so we do a bunch of transfers. Since we are one of the few intensive care units in the area, we admit many patients for a few hours until a transfer can be made. The unit also downgrades many patients to a med-surg area. The ADT work intensity index would be the best measure of unit intensity because of the number of admissions and transfers we do.
The midnight census would be inadequate because it changes day to day. The midnight census looks at how many patients are present at midnight each day (Waxman, 2018). In my home ICU, we admit and transfer many patients each day and night with a different number of crew members. Oftentimes, the night shift runs a skeleton crew where there are a bare minimum number of nurses so admitting new patients is harder while sometimes, we are overstaffed for a single day and make a dozen admissions and transfers. The midnight census would not give an adequate level of unit intensity since it is taken at the same time each day and has no way of accounting for what busy periods occurred in other parts of the day.
The inverse length of stay would not be adequate for my unit because of how much patient turnover there is. The ADT work intensity index is the best measure for my unit because it accounts for the number of admissions, discharges, and transfers that my unit makes.
Reference
Waxman, K.T. (2018). Financial and Business Management for the Doctor of Nursing Practice. Springer Publishing Company.
These are really good reasoning why the ADT Work Intensity index is best for your area, ICU, as well as for all areas within the hospital. In my research for this discussion board, I found a paper that supported the alternate uses other than i/LOS and midnight census because there is so much movement. While there are ‘downgrades,’ to MedSurge floors from ICU, the 2021-2022 reality is that these are step-down patients due to morbidities who then are transferred internally again – all of which adds to the churning of patients and increased intensity in the RN and staff mix workload. Recently, one transporter told me they moved 30 patients out of ERH to different hybrid MedSurge floors, which comes out to 60 moves taken by one staff member. That alone needs to be taken into account which with the other formats would not be addressed.
Hughes, Ronda, Bobay, Kathleen, Jolly, Nicholas, and Suby, Chrysmarie, (2013). Comparison of nurse staffing based on changes in unit-level workload associated with patient churn. Journal of nursing management. 23. 10.1111/jonm.12147.
Waxman KT DNP MBA RN CNL CENP, (2018). Financial and Business Management for the Doctor of Nursing Practice, 2nd edition. Springer Publishing Company, New York. Pages 69-85.
Gavin,
I agree with you that the ADT would be the most accurate work measurement for your unit. Going from working in a small, rural emergency department setting in my previous job where we had to transfer just about any patient that required a higher level of care to a level one trauma center has been a huge adjustment for me in my new job position. Transfers often took up a lot of my time in my previous role. Having to work on getting ambulance or flight transport, calling to give reports and secure a bed in another facility, and making sure the care was completed for the patient before transfer happened is a lot of workload that needs to be considered in a unit where transfers happen regularly. I think the ADT accurately measures workload for these units by taking into consideration the workload of the transfer patients, rather than getting a midnight census where the work of the transfer patient has already been done and the patient is in another facility by now. I think that you make a great point in your discussion board, and I can only imagine how challenging it would be to accept an ICU patient for a few hours, wrap up all of their care to prepare for transfer, and then transfer them out. The ER that I previously worked in would not let us send ICU patients to the unit if they were getting transferred, so I got a lot of experience as an ICU nurse as well. I think it is great that your hospital helps offload this from the emergency department setting. That displays some great teamwork!
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