You have recently been appointed as a trainee Management Accountant at an NHS trust. The trust is made up of 4 hospitals within the region. You have a meeting with a senior manager of the trust who explains about the trust and its hospitals. From the meeting you have learned that the trust has four hospitals ad that each of the 4 hospitals has a number of departments such as cardiology, paediatrics, maternity, etc. and an Accident and Emergency department. Each department has their own specialist doctors and nursing staff and provide a range of services to patients in the wards and in the rooms, deal with outpatients that need specialist treatment, and carry out a range of different operations to deal with various issues. Overhead costs of the hospital may consist of cleaning, cooking meals for the patients as well as the visitors, reception, etc. The senior manager is interested in improving the performance of the hospitals in the trust and has asked you to write a report to him discussing budgeting, budgetary control and performance management.
Write a report to the senior manager of the NHS trust explaining
a. What should be considered in the materials budget, labour budget, overheads budgets.
(20 Marks)
b. The role of budgets within an organisation.
(20 Marks)
c. How budgets may be used to control and improve performance
(20 Marks)
d. Other Management Accounting related performance measurement tools you know, that may be used within the trust.
(30 Marks)
Marks for professionalism, and presentation (including the cover page, contents page, presentation, language and punctuation, in text citations, reference list) (10 Marks)
Total (100 Marks)
Your essay must:
Be written in the format of a business report addressed to the senior manager of the NHS trust, and be complete with a cover page, contents page, numbering, subheadings, and full set of references (including books, journal articles and other sources).
Show clear evidence of application of knowledge to the context of the hospital. That is as far as possible you must relate your explanations to the context of a hospital and give examples from the context of a hospital.
Show clear evidence of research through correctly citing various sources throughout the report and providing a complete set of references that follow the Harvard style of referencing.
Be completed, proofread, and submitted by the deadline via the link on the Moodle site.
There is no requirement to include numbers or calculations for this coursework, as this coursework aims to assess your ability to apply your knowledge within a real life setting, and your ability to critically analyze the usefulness of theory within a given context.
FEEDBACK DATE: Exact date will be confirmed.
The word count is 2,000 words +/- 10%. This is to be strictly adhered to and marks will be deducted accordingly if you go under or over the stated limit.
Only one document may be submitted Appendices are limited to five pages and MUST be referred to in the body of the essay.
