The process determining the manpower and budget requirement for a naval hospital

Abstract

In the span of the past twenty years, significant pressure has been exerted on each of the services, by Congress and senior officials in the Department of Defense, to develop methodologies for providing objective, rigorously derived, quantitative justification for resource requirements. Of the programs that resulted, at the Department of Defense level and within the Navy, several were intended to support the manpower and budget requirements determination process for naval hospitals. Programs emanating from the Department of Defense were the Uniform Chart of Accounts (UCA), Uniform Staffing Methodologies (USM), the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS), and CHAMPUS. Navy sponsored programs were eventually incorporated under the umbrella of the Navy Manpower Engineering Program (NAVMEP). This thesis attempts to describe the process employed within the Navy medical department to determine manpower budget requirements for naval hospitals, the role of each echelon of the chain of command, and the contributions of the formal programs to the process.