Surviving the ax. Developing an education allocation system to verify productivity and resource consumption.

Workloads of nursing educators and nursing education departments as a whole have not always been captured accurately in the past, making it difficult to monitor and communicate resource consumption. Recognizing the need to determine an accurate Relative Value Unit in fiscally reliable terms, a Nursing Education Allocation System was developed to verify productivity and resource consumption. Standard values for each workload were established after a 6-month time study and entered into an automated allocation system. Productivity standards were then derived, making it possible to standardize measurement of workload from year to year and have good decision support data when determining staffing models in response to forecasted educational priorities.