Classmates acting as a finance committee defer a nurse manager's request for night technician hours, and the NU513 Unit 6 reflection rebuilds it in money terms. Searches like "nu 513 unit 6 assignment example", "nu513 unit 6 sample" and "nu513 unit 6 example" land here.
Safety Language Lost to a Return on Investment: A Seminar Reflection on a Mock Finance Committee
[Student Name]
Purdue University Global
NU513: Health Care Finance, Economics, and Strategic Planning
Unit 6 Seminar
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
The seminar's role play and all unit figures are composite and bracketed; the published cost estimate cited is real.
The Request as I Argued It
I walked into the seminar confident. My request was to restore one twelve-hour night technician shift, removed last year, at $120,914 a year. I argued it from safety: night falls had risen from [three] to [five] in the two quarters after the cut, registered nurses were covering technician tasks for a good part of every night, and my nurses were exhausted. I expected the word safety to carry the room.
The Committee
Four classmates played the chief financial officer, the chief nursing officer, the hospitalist medical director and the board's finance chair. Three proposals competed for $150,000: mine; a sepsis navigator for the emergency department, a registered nurse who would track suspected sepsis patients from triage through admission; and a patient portal upgrade for the clinics. The sepsis navigator won. My classmate presenting it named a baseline, the hospital's current length of stay for sepsis admissions, a measure she would track monthly, and a projected return, a half-day reduction in average stay across [310] sepsis admissions a year, at the hospital's variable cost per day.
Then the chief financial officer turned to me and asked the question I had not prepared for: what does the hospital get back?
What I Had Not Done
I had named a cost, a worry and a trend of two data points. I had not named a baseline, a measure or a return. The committee did not reject safety; it rejected a request that gave them no way to judge how much safety the money would buy. My classmate's proposal was not more important than mine. It was better argued in the terms the committee used.
The Request, Rewritten
Before the hour ended, I rewrote the request on the back of my notes. First, I restated it as net cost rather than gross cost. Restoring the technician would also give back the registered nurse hours now spent on technician work, 912.5 hours a year worth $53,677, so the net cost is $120,914 minus $53,677, or $67,237. That nearly halves the ask, and it uses the substitution effect I had written about in the first unit (Finkler et al., 2013).
Second, I asked what it would take for the request to pay for itself. The hospital estimates its own added cost for an inpatient fall with injury at a bracketed $13,900. Dividing $67,237 by $13,900 gives about 4.8. If restoring the technician prevented about five falls with injury a year, it would break even on falls alone, before counting the registered nurse time freed for reassessment and discharge teaching. Published estimates put the cost of an injurious fall much higher: a large multisite analysis found injurious falls associated with added costs of about $36,776 each (Dykes et al., 2023). At that figure, fewer than two prevented injuries a year would cover the net cost.
Third, I named a measure and a baseline: the night-shift rate of injurious falls per thousand patient days, from the unit's reports for the past eight quarters, tracked monthly after the technician returns, with a review at six months.
What the Chief Nursing Officer Said
The classmate playing the chief nursing officer made a point afterward that stayed with me. She said she would have voted for my request if I had given her something to defend it with in the next meeting, because a chief nursing officer who supports a request without numbers loses credibility the next time she asks. That changed how I think about who a request is for. It is not only for the committee; it is for the nursing leader who has to carry it into rooms I am not in.
What I Learned
Safety arguments are not weaker than financial ones; they are incomplete without them. A finance committee must compare requests that promise different things, and it can only compare what has been put in common terms. Drummond et al. (2015) describe economic evaluation as a way of comparing alternatives in terms of both costs and consequences, which is exactly what the committee was trying to do with three proposals and no shared yardstick. Next time, I will bring the net cost, the break-even number and the measure into the room, and let the safety argument explain why the number is worth reaching.
One question remains. Five falls with injury is more than the unit has had at night in any recent year, so my break-even at the hospital's cost estimate may not be reachable on falls alone. Before I resubmit, I need to know whether the hospital's $13,900 figure is still current, or whether the committee would accept a published estimate.
References
Drummond, M. F., Sculpher, M. J., Claxton, K., Stoddart, G. L., & Torrance, G. W. (2015). Methods for the economic evaluation of health care programmes (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
Dykes, P. C., Curtin-Bowen, M., Lipsitz, S., Franz, C., Adelman, J., Adkison, L., Bogaisky, M., Carroll, D., Carter, E., Herlihy, L., Lindros, M. E., Ryan, V., Scanlan, M., Walsh, M., Wien, M., & Bates, D. W. (2023). Cost of inpatient falls and cost-benefit analysis of implementation of an evidence-based fall prevention program. JAMA Health Forum, 4(1), e225125. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2022.5125
Finkler, S. A., Jones, C. B., & Kovner, C. T. (2013). Financial management for nurse managers and executives (4th ed.). Elsevier.
How this NU513 Unit 6 example is structured
Three movements organize the reflection: the request as argued, the committee's reasoning and the revision. The first is written honestly, including the writer's confidence that safety language would carry the room. The second gives the winning proposal its due; the classmate's navigator request named a baseline, a measure and a return, and the reflection concedes that its own request named none of these. Learning makes up the third movement, and it is specific. Restating the request as net cost, gross saving less the registered nurse hours it would recapture, cut the ask nearly in half. Dividing that net cost by the hospital's bracketed cost of a fall with injury produced a break-even the unit's own fall counts could not clearly meet, and the reflection admits it. A closing paragraph records a remaining discomfort: some care matters that no committee can price.
Get an NU513 Unit 6 example written to your instructions
Share your seminar's scenario, the request you or your group argued, and the Unit 6 reflection prompt with its rubric. Within 24-48h an example reflection comes back, tracing how the argument changed, and the first request is free. How your own view moved belongs in your reflection alone. The paper above is an original model document written by our desk, not a submitted student paper and not an official Purdue University Global document.
NU513 Unit 6 questions, answered
What if my request was approved in the role play?
Then reflect on why. An approved request usually had a stated return, a clear baseline or a strong link to the organization's priorities, and naming which of those persuaded the committee is itself learning. You can also reflect on what a skeptical member argued, since the objection often teaches more than the vote. The sample's writer lost, which made the change easier to show.
Should a reflection include calculations?
Not usually, but in a finance course a small calculation can show the revision better than description. The sample includes two figures, a net cost and a break-even, because they are the change in thinking. Keep any arithmetic brief and explained, and make sure it matches figures used elsewhere in your coursework if the same case recurs.
Is it acceptable to say finance language felt uncomfortable?
Yes, if the discomfort is examined rather than just expressed. The sample ends by admitting that some care has no line in a budget, after first showing that the revised request is stronger. That balance reads as reflection. A reflection that rejects financial reasoning outright tends to score lower, since the course asks nurse leaders to use it.