Continuing professional development in administrative competencies for doctors and nurses

Administration plays a major role in any business or an establishment. Likewise, hospital is also a place which needs effective administration as it involves a group of people like doctors, nurses, paramedics, etc who work in the achievement of excellence in service delivery. This study investigated the administrative competency needs of two major groups namely; the doctors and nurses for effective health care administration at unit level. This was carried out in a multispecialty hospital and for assessing administrative skills questionnaire was framed based on a model developed by National Institute of Health (NHS). This model served as a main instrument for data collection. It was a thirty item questionnaire on Administrative support; internal resource management; Policy, procedure awareness, development and implementation; project administration; and qualitative and quantitative analysis. This was used to obtain information from 20 doctors and 100 nurses of administrative levels through stratified random sampling method. This study was purely a descriptive study which involved observations and description of the behavior of a subject. Study involved various statistical tools like percentage analysis, weighted average analysis, Anova and Chi square. It revealed that doctors and nurses lack in few administrative competencies like; maintaining other documents, record keeping systems, preparation of manageable and realistic budgets, gathering and benchmarking information from stake holders, communication of operational issues through mail, usage of tools/models for analyzing data. It has become a lifelong responsibility for doctors and nurses to involve in continuous professional development in administrative competency, as this will enable them to become able administrators in the hospital environment.