Inservice education: calculating the cost

Cost effectiveness is the mandate in healthcare today. Nursing staff development especially has needed to rethink its methodologies because of the significant cost of programs. The Department of Nursing Education and Resources of Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio adopted an "All-Day" concept in an effort to achieve maximum efficiency from its resources for inservice education. To comprehensively and accurately determine how efficient the all-day method was in terms of cost in comparison with the previous "unit-based" process, a detailed cost analysis was undertaken. Each method was studied for 1 year, and the comparison revealed the all-day method was more viable from a cost perspective, as well as more beneficial from the participants' perspective.