Nursing Together: Financial Management in Nursing

This week we are going to dive into the importance of financial management in nursing 

Transcript

Choehns: 0:11

Welcome back to Nursing Together, the podcast where we explore the heart and science of nursing. I'm your host, Michelle Hoen, and today we are gonna dive into a topic that often feels a little less familiar to many nurses, But one that is crucial for our profession, nursing financial management. Why is nursing financial management so important to nursing now? Finance management isn't just about numbers on a spreadsheet. It's about ensuring that we have the resources, staff, and structure to provide the very best care to our patients while maintaining stability for our hospital and healthcare system. Let's break down this together. We have to make sure that our patients are receiving the care and outcomes that they need, and understand how our financials can help provide adjusting our resources appropriate. To ensure that we are getting this excellent care. Let's start with something that many of you have heard of before, which is hours per patient day or HPPD. HPPD is a way to measure how many nursing hours are provided to care for a patient in a given day. For example, if your unit has 20 patients and the H-P-P-E-D is set at six, that means leadership has the budget for 120 hours of nursing care for that day. It's a tool that helps balance staffing with patient care needs. HPPD is important. So as nurses we can understand times where we might not be as productive or where we might need to decrease our number of nurses that we have on the unit. And then vice versa. The same goes when we need more nurses to provide the care necessary when our acuity increases, or the turbulence on the unit is greater than normal. Closely tied to HPPD are nursing ratios, which is the number of patients assigned to each nurse as we stated earlier, our HPPD can help us determine the ratios necessary for each unit ratios, ensure safe and effective care, but they must align with the budget and our resources. Too. Few nurses creates a risk for a patient. It's and burnout for staff. Too many and the department may become financially unstable. That is why it is important to find the right balance, both in the art and the science of nursing. So let's talk about budgets. In healthcare, we generally work with three types of budgets. The operating budget, which is our day to day. Operating Working budget. It covers staffing, supplies and the costs to keep that unit running smoothly. Capital budgets. Focus on the big ticket items. Items like new beds or monitors or renovation projects. These are investments for the organization that lasts for years, and then cash budgets. This is about the cash flow and making sure that the hospital is getting funded appropriately. For the care that the patients are receiving. And it can also include things like payroll or vendor payments. As nurses, we have to make sure that we are aligning the budgets that have been designed for us so we can influence how we are monitoring our patient care needs. Our staffing levels and the resources that are necessary for our unit. One of the most important roles for us in nursing is to monitor and analyze the unit's needs. This involves looking at census trends, acuity overtime, uses and supplies, and then there's productivity. A key measurement here is our Nursing hours per patient day, similar to HPPD, but it focuses more on the actual hours worked versus budgeted productivity Reports show whether or not your unit is staffing effiectively and efficiently compared to what the budget is saying. Running consistently over or under can be flags that either the patient's needs aren't being met or the resources are being stretched unnecessarily. The goal isn't to cut corners. It's to make sure that our resources are being used in a way that supports safe, high quality care while respecting the financial stability. Why should nurses care about financial management? Because every budget line represents patient care and staff wellbeing. When we understand the numbers, we gain a voice in decision making. We can advocate for more effective staffing resources and safe patient ratios because we can link the patient outcomes directly to the financial stewardship, and ultimately, this strengthens our profession. Nursing isn't just about the heart of healthcare. It's also one of the largest investments in the healthcare system. By managing our resources wisely, we protect our patients, our colleagues, and the future of nursing itself. Thank you for joining me today in Nursing Together. I hope this episode takes some of the mystery out of nursing financial management because the truth is. As nurses, we are not just caregivers. We are leaders. We are advocates, and we are stewards of our resources. Until next time, keep leading, learning and nursing together. I.