Health service in Brazilian private and public hospitals: Budgetary participation, feedback and performance from clinical managers perception

Abstract

Budgetary control is pointed as a managerial mechanism suitable for cost reduction and control as well as performance evaluation of institutions. In health organizations, budget is used for funds allocation, coordination, control and communication of the institutions' strategies. In this context, the research will observe the phenomenon of budgetary process from the perspective of Health Service managers of public and private hospitals, called "clinical managers". It aims to check whether there is a relation between the budgetary process characteristics and the budgetary execution performance. Three hypotheses were tested for the analysis of the following budget characteristic, budgetary participation, budgetary feedback and budgetary evaluation. This theoretical research model is going to be analyzed using the structural equation method. The study evaluates if there is a relationship between the budget process characteristic and the budget execution indicator, called meeting the budget. The snowball sample technique was used to sample the research respondents. Thirty three clinical managers were used as sample for the study. The hypotheses were tested using the Smart Pls software. Only Hypothesis 3 was supported statistically, asserting that there is a positive and significant relationship between the budgetary evaluation characteristic and the budget execution performance. These evidences indicate that health service managers recognize the budgetary evaluation as a predominant feature which interferes with the budgetary execution of their field due to the liability on the result of such execution and the possibility of using this metrics in performance evaluation.