English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Laboratories are complex work-places with secretarial and administrative, as well as analytical, functions. They are sometimes described as factories, converting the raw material of patient specimens into the finished product of patient reports. Although this is an inexact comparison, it does suggest that management practices from manufacturing industries might be applicable to laboratories. Cost accounting is one such management practice: costs are analysed into a number of elements and these are recombined in various ways according to the purpose to be served. Such a purpose might be selection of an operating procedure, control of expenditure, or the setting of prices for the product. In this paper, cost analysis and cost-benefit analysis for guidance or selection of operating procedures, and for controlling expenditures, will be discussed. Price setting, although it is needed by commercial laboratories and by clinical laboratories where laboratory costs are reimbursed by insurers or other third parties, is best developed using another approach (absorption costing), which is discussed in relevant textbooks [1 and 2]. Selection of operating procedures may include investment decisions for new equipment or restaffing. Since costs are recombined in various ways to suit various purposes, it is clear that there is no unique, true and wholly accurate total cost for any particular laboratory activity. The total cost depends on the allocation ofindirect labour, materials and overheads to identified direct labour and material costs. It should also be clear that there can be no immediate single solution to the problem ofrunning a laboratory both efficiently and cost-effectively. Laboratories in a given size of hospital might be expected to have similar analytical tasks. In individual laboratories, however, the existing structure and organization in each of the domains of instrumentation, data-processing and management, results from a mixture of functional requirements and specific local historical and geographical factors:

Special problems of cost analysis and cost-benefit analysis as applied to large multi-test analysers