Introduction
Nursing is a challenging profession that aims at helping people but involves numerous tasks that nurses have to fulfill to make their work more efficient and useful for society. One of these tasks is proper budgeting, in which the expenses for nursing training should take a special place (Carroll, 2006, p. 129). The importance of budget management for nursing training and education is emphasized by the fact that the majority of nurses, as Doyle and Williamson (2005) argue, lack budgeting knowledge and skills (p. 3). So, budgeting is an essential element of nursing and a basic task for a nurse manager heading a healthcare unit.
Unit Description
The unit considered in this paper is a respiratory care unit in which medical services are presented to patients that experience respiratory disorders and difficulties due to such diverse reasons as pneumonia, cardiac problems, and/or diseases of other nature. The majority of the unit’s patients require artificial airway and ventilator-assisted breathing services.
Therefore, the unit is equipped with all necessary equipment which, however, requires permanent updating. The population of the unit consists of 50 patients displaying varying degrees of respiratory disorders and, respectively, various levels of nursing services provided to them.
Patient Needs and Required Staff Skills
In more detail, the needs of the unit population vary according to the degree of seriousness of their respiratory problems. Thus, there are 5 patients that require permanent air ventilation as their breathing functions are damaged. The remaining 45 patients require occasional air ventilation services and permanent intravenous injections to be carried out. Therefore, the staff of the respiratory care unit should have the respective skills to provide the required services. As such, the unit nurses should be able to (Hicks, 2006, pp. 8 – 9):
- Operate the artificial air ventilation equipment;
- Be prepared to react to minimal breakdowns of the equipment;
- Be ready to provide alternative services in cases of emergency;
- Carry out intravenous injections;
- Be attentive to patients’ complaints and needs;
- Display the highest levels of communicational and professional ethics.
To ensure that the unit nurses have the above listed skills and can implement it in practice, regular training is required. Accordingly, a special point in the unit nursing budget should be the one governing the funding of nursing training and education courses.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Drawing from the above, the following cost-benefit analysis will illustrate the obvious usefulness of increased nursing education funding in the overall unit nursing budget. The sums in the analysis are approximate, but their interrelation allows forming a proper opinion about the positive outcomes of the education-oriented nursing unit budgeting scheme:
Conclusions
Thus, even the approximate cost-benefit analysis reveals that increased investment into nursing training and education can become a rather financially useful initiative for the respiratory care unit under discussion. Moreover, the outcomes of the additional training might improve the public image of the unit and facilitate its development in this way as well.
References
Carroll, P. (2006). Nursing leadership and management: a practical guide. Thomson/Delmar Learning.
Doyle, G. and Williamson, P. (2005). Nurse Managers and Devolved Budgeting: An Education Gap? UCD Business Schools, 8(5), 1 – 60.
Hicks, C. (2006). The training and development needs of nurses in Indonesia. Human Resources for Health 4, 10.