Evaluating the Effectiveness of Internal Controls between Public and Private Hospitals

Abstract

In the current economic environment, the trend of business activities and an ever-changing business has made it imperative for all forms of entities be it public or private to maintain and ensure internal control systems that are effective and can achieve optimum results for the entity in question. The main objective of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of internal control systems between private and public hospitals. Descriptive research design was employed for the study, largely using primary data from a total of thirty-five (35) respondents from 27 hospitals of which eleven (11) were public hospitals and the remaining sixteen (16) were private hospitals. For sampling purposes, the purposive and the convenience sampling techniques were employed to achieve the objectives of the study. From the study, it was revealed that both public and private hospitals attested to the existence of some policies and procedures which ultimately ensure internal controls in the hospitals. In addition, it was found that control systems are largely effective in both private and public hospitals, taking into account the percentage of persons who were in agreement that these systems have been effective tremendously except for the fact that when it comes to the private hospitals, the percentage of agreement is higher than that of public hospitals. This means that the private hospitals have been more effective as a result of the internal control systems. Furthermore, it is revealed that internal controls have had positive impact on both private and public hospitals. However, the positive impact in the case of private hospitals was found to be higher. It was also found that when it comes to challenges, private hospitals are better managers of the challenges possibly because they have ICS that function properly as compared to that of the public hospitals. It is thus recommended that to ensure the achievement of optimum effectiveness through the institution of ICS, the management of the hospitals must ensure that they provide their employees with the needed training as well as developmental programs prior to and after implementation of internal control systems to ensure their efficiency hence ensuring their effectiveness.