Performance Reporting and Program Budgeting: Tools for Program Evaluation

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Abstract
This paper dis-cusses the use of 3 administrative techniques, Performance Reports, Performance Budgets, and Program Budgets, in the field of Public Health, It emphasizes that they are merely tools for program evaluation and not the "be-all and end-all" of administration. A performance reporting system differs from the usual reporting systems in that it reports all activities in terms of work done in a specific program. For example, nursing visits are tabulated according to the purpose for which they were made, such as tuberculosis or communicable disease control, rather than merely as nursing visits. The program concept is the important factor, not the activity count per se. Program budgeting is defined as a line budget broken down for each specific program. With this information the administrator is able to evaluate program accomplishment against program cost, and to evaluate this information further in the light of his professional judgment. The Performance Budget is an often-discussed, but poorly-understood evaluative technique. While program budgeting is cost assignment to various programs, performance budgeting is basically cost accounting on a service unit basis. Many objectives of health agencies cannot be accurately measured on a service unit basis, and the Performance Budget is therefore not a valid evaluative tool in the field of public health practice. In most instances direct supervision, reporting, and inspection can take the place of assigning costs to those work units which are so subjective that the estimation of cost may be wholly erroneous. In most health agencies, therefore, Program Budgeting, not Performance Budgeting, combined and integrated with Performance Reporting will provide the best, most readily available, and most reliable tool for effective program evaluation.

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