Wednesday, December 10, 2008

FTE calculations for budgeting purposes

Do any of the Hospital’s in Maine use gross square footage of their facilities to benchmark their FTE (full-time employee) calculations for budgeting purposes? York Hospital has historically utilized adjusted patient days for all FTE budgetary staffing calculations (clinical and non-clinical) which is not very effective for Environmental Services staff (Engineering, Maintenance, Housekeeping, Biomed and Security), particularly given the growth of our facility in recent years. If any facility managers are using an alternate means to benchmark or assess appropriate staffing levels, I’d be interested in talking with them about their organization’s methodology.

5 comments:

Maine Healthcare Engineers said...

We all get impacted by revenue but occupied SF is what should be considered.

Maine Healthcare Engineers said...

SMMC uses the Solucient benchmark tool, and SF including roofs is the standard. There is also a factor for SF of grounds maintained.
There is a similar but different formula for Security Services.

Maine Healthcare Engineers said...

I have never been excited about the Square Foot benchmark for FTE’s, I doesn’t take in consideration staff complement such as, do you have in house Biomed,are you requires to have 27/7 steam plant coverage or if you have a lot of light commercial square footage such as Medical office space etc. There is no perfect benchmark, one thing for sure, we will have to fight for FTE in the future.

Maine Healthcare Engineers said...

What company are you using for the benchmarking? It is important to know how they normalize the data. There should be a series of questions that indicate if you are doing something different then your comparison group. The data should also give several comparison indicators such as SF, APD's, worked hours vs. paid hours, etc....

But in the end it is a benchmark that gives a general comparison average.

Maine Healthcare Engineers said...

I’m not so sure I’m excited about it either, but as our organization continues to construct additional buildings throughout York County, and tries to maintain them with staffing levels that have remained constant for nearly a decade, our current system is becoming quite strained. We are also the de-facto property manager for numerous condo-associations. All-in-all, the workload from the off-site properties is beginning to approach that which we have here at the Hospital. I think that we all need to acknowledge that no benchmark is perfect, but hopefully we can be use them as a point of reference from which to draw conclusions that are appropriate for each our unique organizational situations.