My world is all about the numbers. How should I be preparing for the future?
Designing your financial model is a critical step in the design and implementation of your Safe Patient Handling Program. Safe Patient Handling Programs have been evolving over the last 30 years and are gaining momentum through evidence based studies. The accumulated statistics show the healthcare environment to be prone to caregiver physical injuries. Injuries result in increased operating costs, whether they are direct costs such as sick leave, Workers Compensation, and insurance, or indirect costs such as caregivers prematurely leaving the workforce or consequential costs such as low employee moral or inability to recruit new employees, most costs today have been studied and are quantifiable. Against these costs many case studies have been focused on the direct cost benefits from implementing a Safe Patient Handling program. You need to understand these studies and how they relate to your individual healthcare facility and it’s financial model.
Recent studies have sought to more clearly identify financial costs and their relationships and update the methodology involved in analyzing Safe Patient Handling programs. One of the latest studies, “A New Model for Successful Safe Patient Handling Programs” contains a section on Economic Evaluation Methodology which is worthy of your understanding. Their results concluded that the studied programs actually returned cost savings many times greater than their actual cost. This study is linked for your reference.