Dear Dr Charbel Salloum, I would really appreciate any comment you can give me on it.

Best Regards!

Is it recommended to use best practice guides as a means to devise a conceptual framework in a research?

Think the phrase "best practice" subjects to different people interpretation (the best practice to some people may not be best practice to others) & might change from time to time (the best practice now might be superseded by other best practices in future).  Suggesting when a researcher is developing his / her conceptual framework, s/he should cite relevant theory / theories that his or her conceptual framework is underpinning on.  When a developed conceptual framework is underpinning on the right theory / theories, the framework can stand the acid test of being questioned by thesis examiners / journal article reviewers.

Dear Dr. Han Ping Fung, thank you very much for your feedback. Because the guide is research-based, i am assuming that it has a theoretical foundation.

Dear Gedion,

I think it is a good idea to rely on a pre-existing framework for the sake of assurance and controllability. I think it is pretty difficult to develop your own framework from scratch that will be of a quality required by practice and by academia. Also, if you develop your own idea of something going beyond the established framework or even challenging it, you can test your idea against the framework and you will have a reliable source of reference.

Paul

Dear Gedion

1. The best practice guidelines of the Australian National Audit Audit Office are as good as any guidelines of that kind. ANAO is a competent and diligent organisation. However, you should keep in mind two cautions.

2. First, they deal with the PROCESS of setting a justifying, setting and monitoring a budget, not with the SUBSTANTIVE program, which is hospital management in Ethiopia. You should have a parallel set of best practice guidelines that relate to health and hospital administration, including objectives (cured or healthy people, etc), preconditions for meeting them (healthy food, trained staff, medicines, etc), challenges to be overcome et cetera. These guidelines for hospital management will apply for a longer period then the term of a single budget (which is often only one year). You should keep in mind that the budget is a means to an end being cured or healthy people. Budget control is just a tool to that purpose.

3. Second, guidelines of the kind that explain the importance of setting objectives and measuring importance are usually written from a RATIONALIST mindset. But the real world is not entirely rationalist (run according to reason and logic). Humans are motivated partly by reason but also by emotion and by power.

John Ralston Saul's book Voltaire's Bastards is a very good and very readable explanation of how leaders who stick to rationalist thinking can go badly astray. He cited examples such as the Vietnam war and the World Bank.

4. Economics and accounting are rationalist disciplines. To run a hospital effectively, you will also need people who are expert in public administration, medicine, human behaviour, sociology and other fields of knowledge which are not by their nature rationalist; and senior leaders who can exercise good JUDGEMENT (or common sense).

5.There is of course a conceptual framework at the heart of the ANAO best practice guidelines. It is a rationalist framework. In audit guidelines, it has to be rationalist. However, the conceptual framework that you will need to manage your hospital will be broader than the budget framework. So the answer to your question is that yes, you can use those three elements in your case study, so long as you remember that they are tracking only one of the processes needed to manage a hospital successfully.

6. I don't know whether the person who set you this assignment wants you to remain focused just on budget processes, or will allow you to step outside the boundaries of budget practice in your report. Even if you are expected to remain within a budget conceptual framework, you should point out that the budget lies within a much larger organisational and public policy context.