Benchmarking working time in health care: the case of Excelcare

Abstract

In the 2000-2004 Enterprise Bargaining round between the Australian Nursing Union and the South Australian state government, it was agreed that public hospitals would be staffed according to Excelcare timings or benchmarks. Excelcare is a computerised workload produce that measures the number of hours and minutes needed to perform a range of nursing tasks for patients on a given ward. This brought into sharp relief disagreements between the various parties over Excelcare timings, but more importantly, it illustrates the unions' strategic use of the Enterprise Bargaining process to de-intensify nursing labour.