Question

Simulated situation:

The census of patients confined to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) has increased in the last month, thus increasing the number of admissions. As a consequence, the use of medical surgical supplies has risen. Consider cost and quality factors when proposing your budget estimate.

Exercise: Answer the following questions broadly. (Minimum 200 words)

As a group leader, what would you recommend to your followers to stay within budget to control spending at ICU? (Minimum (3) three recommendations

Answer 1

Controlling ICU costs can be a tough task but with discipline, good communication, and proper resource allocation expenditure can be controlled but this does not mean a patient's health has to be compromised.

1. Planned ICU care and Unplanned/Emergency ICU care should be taken into account separately. Patient turnover rate is a major determining factor in the use of resources. If the resources were increased to reduce the duration of stay, The overall cost can be reduced without compromising the quality of care. The active and disciplinary flow of work can reduce the stay by a day, hence saving resources and cost.

2. The ICU authorities should plan for elective intensive care while keeping in mind the overall hospital strategy and what other special units such as neurology, surgery, etc. are doing. These stakeholders need to share the responsibility and risks with the ICU.

For a given population or community, The number of emergency admissions will be relatively constant unless new treatments alter the indications, e.g. for cerebrovascular emergencies. Key issues for leaders to address are how many resources are allocated for patients with little chance of meaningful survival and for patients with a low risk of organ dysfunction or need for treatment.

3. Budgeting is the creation of a spending plan that allows you to determine in advance whether you will have enough money to do the things you need to do or would like to do. Discussion with the leader of specialties or neurosurgery and neurology, cardiac and vascular surgery, cardiology, visceral surgery, and medicine can help smoothen the flow of work and help resource allocation in a better way. The inclusion of the Therapeutic Intervention Scoring System (TISS) score based on annual statistics on relevant patient groups, prediction of production costs, and agreement on cost, billing departments can also help plan the expenditure.

Maintaining track of Internal services such as radiology, laboratory services can be used on an hourly basis instead of keeping them operational for the whole day.

Staff salaries make the most of ICU's budget, so proper allocation of personnel is also very important and unwanted employees i.e. Those who are not needed at the moment should be allocated on some other case or should be on leave.