Traditionally productivity has been an economic concept operationalized as the cost ratio of output, or saleable goods and services, in relationship to costs of labor and other resources input into a system. A review and synthesis of nursing and health care management productivity literature reveals administrators and researchers often focus exclusively on economic input-output terms of nursing work. Work and productivity in health care contexts is unique. Such work involves inputs of “hard” capital assets such as monies, equipment and supplies, and a wide variety of “human” capital inputs.

Human capital in the health production function is represented by the intellectual knowledge, competencies, and skills of health care providers and patients themselves. Recent literature suggests attention to models and management strategies that support the development and stewardship of intellectual capital in knowledge-intense organizations.

There is current evidence of movement toward accounting for both the human and intellectual capital in nursing and health care services in four areas: 1) Patient input through patient acuity or patient characteristic measures; 2) Accounting for provider cost input and interdepartmental process incentives through interdisciplinary provider productivity measures; 3) Application of nurses’ knowledge input through measures such as nurses’ knowledge classification systems, interdisciplinary informatics, and nurse productivity indices; and 4) The proposed application of intellectual capital theories to nurse providers’ input/output as integral to the production function of health. A model of human intellectual capital that embraces nurse productivity benchmarks is defined, explained and discussed.

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Back to 15th International Nursing Research Congress
Sigma Theta Tau International
July 22-24, 2004