Question

What are the most important issues in development of budget to the nurse leader

Answer 1

In a healthcare organization, budget is a document that detail the proper allocation and utilization of financial resources to ensure that the organization is able to provide quality healthcare services and to achieve their goals for a fiscal year. It is essential for a nurse to understand the guidelines of financial management. Nurse have a responsibility to participate and contribute to the budgeting as grow into supervisory and management positions. Until recently, nurse manager/leaders had less responsibility in budget planning; however, in the recent years, the nurse leaders participation in budgeting has grown tremendously. Opinions and suggestions from the nurse leaders are often considered to be inevitable for a good budget management. Nurse leaders/managers who participate in the budget planning are more likely to be cost-conscious and appreciate the satisfactory functioning of their units to meet the overall financial goals. Nevertheless, the nurse leaders face numerous challenges while participating and contributing to the budget development, as discussed below:

• Collecting relevant data: This is critical task in the budgeting process. A nurse leader should find reliable data to form a basis for budget planning. It often requires the nurse leaders to the refer to the previous budget, training resources, and other financial resources to obtain consistent and dependable data, which is time consuming and demands a lot of efforts.  
• Lack of intrinsic motivation: Their is often a lack of motivation among the nurse leaders to participate in financial planning. They tend to define themselves as performers than getting actively involved in the financial decision making. This lack of intrinsic motivation significant affects their job performance.   
• Defending the proposals: Creating the budget often involves defending the ideas proposed. Nurse leaders must be prepared to defend their ideas with back up data and supportive evidences.   
• Insufficient training and education on the financial management and nursing economics: Although, the curriculum for the student nurses include critical information detailing the financial management, it is believed that there is insufficient training regarding the practical applicability of the basics of financial planning.
• Interfering with interdepartment/intradepartment cooperative and communication: Budget development mandates active coordination among the multiple departments across the healthcare organization. The nurse leader, a critical personnel involved in the budget planning, often faces hurdles synchronizing data from other departments.    
• Insufficient reference managerial tools: There are inadequate reference materials for the nurse managers to refer for relevant training.