Nowadays, many healthcare organizations aim at providing successful budgeting policies and promoting new ideas to improve the quality of services and access to information about patients and their diseases. To achieve good results, it is necessary to involve as many medical workers as possible. The participation of nurses in the creation of budgeting policies is obvious because they can influence the most crucial points of the process and give a clear explanation of why the chosen financial support is important. Nurses have to know as many details about the budgeting process of the Emergency Room as possible to provide qualified and appropriate medical services.
One of the first steps that need to be done in the budget process is the choice of the interdisciplinary team members. The potential members of the team are the nurses, who know about all processes in the Emergency Room, and the financial workers, who know how to find the best financial propositions to the required services and nursing demands, and even social workers, who remain to be an invisible still a considerable part of the ER team. For example, a budgeting policy team should contain several social workers, who perform a non-medical portion of work but know a lot about the patients’ demands and expectations as they offer services like consultations or search for the most applicable referrals (Auerbach & Mason, 2009). Several nurses perform the role of the main promoters of demands within an emergency department as they can rely on their methods on how to find information, make it available to specialized doctors, correct the errors, and organize the whole ER work (Henneman, Blank, Gawlinski, & Henneman, 2008). They should cooperate with financial specialists to find the necessary portion of financial support regarding the existing medical demands.
In the development of the budget, nurses have several specific responsibilities. First, they need to evaluate the overall quality of services offered at ERs. Nurses know what kind of information is necessary and how to share it in the possible shortest period. They have to underline the importance of special technologies that need to be financed. Second, nurses know about the necessity of different medical staff and should share this information while developing the budget of ERs because ER services have to be supported with a properly chosen material. Finally, nurses are aware of the main patients’ needs and have to consider this point in their reports. In other words, the main responsibility of every nurse, who participates in developing a budget plan, is to use his/her practical knowledge and explain the importance of each requirement.
The main fact concerning the role of nurses in ER budget development is the necessity to involve as many nurses as possible because the success of the activities is possible when an organization is considered as a whole with every member mentioned. It is not enough to make one leading nursing being responsible for the development of the budget. Though one nurse may analyze and gather information, the majority of nurses should participate in questionnaires to find interesting and important information. This is what a good budget development process should look like. Only in case, each ER contributes to the development of the department, the success of its work will be possible and the budget policy created on the nurses’ ideas will be effective within the frames of a particular hospital.
References
Auerbach, C. & Mason, S. (2010). The value of the presence of social work in emergency departments. Social Work in Health Care, 49(4), 314-326.
Henneman, E.A., Blank, F.S.J., Gawlinski, A., & Henneman, P.L. (2008). Strategies used by nurses to recover medical errors in an academic emergency department setting. Applied Nursing Research, 19(2), 70-77.