Chapter 10, Problem 10MTC

Sacred Heart Hospital (SHH) faces skyrocketing nursing costs, all of which relate to its two biggest nursing service lines—the Emergency Room (ER) and the Operating Room (OR). SHH’s current cost system assigns total nursing costs to the ER and OR based on the number of patients serviced by each line. Total hospital annual nursing costs for these two lines are expected to equal $300,000. The table below shows expected patient volume for both lines.

After discussion with several experienced nurses, Jack Bauer (SHH’s accountant) decided that assigning nursing costs to the two service lines based on the number of times that nurses must check patients’ vital signs might more closely match the underlying use of costly hospital resources. Therefore, for comparative purposes, Jack decided to develop a second cost system that assigns total nursing costs to the ER and OR based on the number of times nurses check patients’ vital signs. This system is referred to as the “vital-signs costing system.” The earlier table also shows data for vital signs checks for lines.

In an effort to better plan for and control OR costs, SHH management asked Jack to calculate the flexible budget variance (i.e., flexible budget costs - actual costs) for OR nursing costs, including the price variance and efficiency variance. Given that Jack is interested in comparing the reported costs of both systems, he decided to prepare the requested OR variance analysis for both the current cost system and the vital-signs costing system. In addition, Jack chose to use each cost system’s estimate of the cost per OR nursing hour as the standard cost per OR nursing hour. Jack collected the following additional information for use in preparing the flexible budget variance for both systems:

Actual number of surgeries performed = 950

Standard number of nursing hours allowed for each OR surgery = 5

Actual number of OR nursing hours used = 5,000

Actual OR nursing costs = $190,000

What does each of the calculated variances suggest to Jack regarding actions that he should or should not take with respect to investigating and improving each variance? Also, briefly explain why the variances differ between the two cost systems.