Professor Scott Holmes has translated his expertise in business management and health economics into an active portfolio of industry and government consultancies.

Scott is Professor of Accounting, Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research), Dean of Graduate Studies, Honorary Professor UQ Business School and Professorial Fellow Charles Darwin University. He has led the development of a course for NSW Health’s 7,500 clinical managers aimed at improving budget integrity. Scott is also the head of one of five groups that will deliver the training statewide.

Clinicians’ primary focus is patient care however they are also bound by budgetary constraints. The course gives clinicians the knowledge and skills to make decisions about how they manage their budgets and understand the relationship between decisions they make and fiscal management.

The course has been designed to address the need for an understanding and appreciation of key concepts and issues with respect to setting, reviewing, control and reporting of clinical unit budgets. The course directly addresses the day-today challenges of balancing a unit's budget with the issues of high quality patient care, particularly with the cost of health care growing by 7% per annum.

The course is a combination of face-to-face and online and all concepts (management accounting, budgeting and economic terms) are explained in a clinical context and participants use their own experiences in case studies. In the four pilot courses undertaken across NSW, participants identified savings and practices that could change.

The course materials and modules will be delivered through the new Health Education Training Institute established by the NSW Ministry of Health. The genesis of the course development was a review into base hospital funding and Scott’s subsequent report Financial Management – Budgeting in a health context

Q&A with Professor Holmes

NBN News Innovators Series - Wednesday 14 November 2012

Anyone who’s ever tried to balance the family budget knows what a tricky task it can be, but imagine juggling billions of dollars where lives are at stake.

That’s the stressful job health administrators face and it’s only getting harder.

Tonight, as our series on Newcastle Innovation’s high achievers continues, we meet a business whiz who’s helping health bosses manage the seemingly impossible.