Mission: To be the most precise and reachable emergency health services providers in Nova Scotia.
This document provides a brief summary of the budget proposed to operate 24 hours Emergency department in the city of Halifax. Cost is intended as the value of resources used to produce something. For the sake of convenience of the reader I divided the cost into 4 subheadings: Fixed costs, Variable costs, Direct costs, Indirect costs and Sunk costs.
Fixed costs are those costs which do not vary with the output produced that include salaries for physicians and nurses, technicians and nurse manager and different equipment used in ER department. On the other hand the variable cost varies with the amount of output produced like heating and cooling and power and telephone bill and different types of consumables. Sunk costs are a special type of fixed costs, representing those that have been occurred in the past and cannot be recovered. In our health care settings our Information technology with EMR is considered as sunk cost.
Also costs have been identified as direct costs and indirect costs and overhead costs. Direct costs are considered that cost which can be tracked to the activity and are consumed directly in an procedure and some of the direct costs includes human capital and the consumables. Indirect and overheads costs cannot be directly allocated, because their shared resources serve different patients. These costs provide overhead support services to the patients. In health care, some of the expenses worth mentioning are security and vendor fees for managing the EMR system. Some of the administrative costs not directly related to care activity can also be attributed to indirect costs.
Limitation: Though the list seems to be exhausting yet it provides an overview of the operating cost to run the ER. But it will be difficult to know cost of some of the shared activities with rest of the hospital departments