Productivity Terms

by ChrysMarie Suby, RN, MS

Nursing and finance must partner to speak the language of finance to prevent misunderstandings affecting the use of labor resources and dollars. We recommend the following definitions for reporting various types of labor hours. When using productivity benchmarks, be sure to ask the benchmarking company and/or your finance department for the formulas used and a glossary of terms. You want to be sure you understand how to compare each benchmark with your budget values.

Direct care: All hours of care or service directly given to patients as defined in the unit’s budgeted variable staffing plan.

Indirect care: All hours of care or service given to support patient care or service. This includes all staff who do not take a patient or service assignment, such as managers, unit clerks/secretaries, monitor techs, video attendants, APRNs, and unit-based educators. It should also include the calculated allowance for the “backfill” of hours for time the employees are assigned to be off of the unit attending inservices, meetings, shared governance committees, and other education, as well as the hours employees spend participating in unit-specific orientation and all other hours where employees work and are paid.

Productive or total worked: All worked and paid hours of care by all staff. Equals direct plus indirect hours.

Paid and worked other hours: This includes education and orientation hours provided by staff development, human resources, and other departments to cover their expenses in providing employer-required education and orientation programs.

Paid but not worked benefit hours: For example, vacation, holiday, sick leave, jury duty, etc. Paid nonworked hours (i.e., benefit hours) are reported separately as we do not believe that total paid hours per patient is a useful factor for comparison.

Total paid hours: All paid total worked/productive hours, plus nonproductive benefit, education, and orientation hours.