Financial Benchmarking Within an Organization.

Running head: BENCHMARKING WITHIN AN ORGANIZATION

Michael Loomis, RN

Professor M. Richards

South University

Financial Management for Nurses

August 3, 2009

Benchmarking Within an Organization

Implementing benchmarking strategies at the unit level has many benefits. Benchmarking is defined as “process designed to discover best practices through a comparison of various competing methods aimed at achieving a particular goal” (Bhavani, 2000). Typically it is used to compare amongst different organizations, but can easily be applied within an organization. Each unit has an established set of practices, guidelines, budgeting, etc that it uses in the way that works most appropriately for the staff and the unit. Comparing these to other units can easily identify areas that can be improved upon.

Some units have better than average representation when it comes to house-wide committees and shared governance councils, a fact which helps them to be at the forefront of decision making for the entire hospital. Other units would be well advised to take advantage of these committees to help understand what is really going on around the hospital. Units can also be benchmarked in terms of evidenced-based practice and how their outcomes compare to other similar units, such as multiple medical-surgical units within the hospital. It is also possible to benchmark units in terms of hours per patient day and utilization of appropriate staff members. Internal comparison can also highlight situations where one unit has high turnover comparatively to the rest of the organization and find out what may be causing the problem and also receive help from other units in terms of fixing the issues.

Internal benchmarking, as well as external benchmarking can bring staff together for a shared goal of being the best, the unit that others benchmark against for having the best practices. It should be every staff member’s goal to improve their practice and those...