Abstract
As a part of revision of medical fee scheme in 2006, a new nursing distribution standard has been introduced to achieve proper distribution of nursing personnel for acute setting, which is so-called 7 : 1 nursing. The purpose of this research is to estimate cost and profit of the introduction of 7 : 1 nursing at a municipal hospital with 600 acute beds as a case. We also analysed the effect of the 7 : 1 nursing introduction on the hospital's overall financial management.
We found that the 7 : 1 nursing generally put pressure on hospital profit due to increased human resource cost even though hospitals can earn profit by increasing basic inpatient fees. While a hospital introduces 7 : 1 nursing and recruits new graduates only to keep costs minimum, however, additional human resource cost will exceed the profit from the second year of the introduction.
Municipal hospitals have roles to provide highly advanced medical treatment to the community as a regional center hospital, which require certain number of nurses with appropriate experience. Therefore, it is common for these hospitals to introduce the 7 : 1 nursing. This study suggested, when municipal hospitals introduce 7 : 1 nursing, that proper financial strategies should be needed.
