With all of the discussions surrounding nurse to patient ratios, nurse staffing, increasing the nursing workforce through nursing education, it is always interesting to see alternative approaches to shortages in nursing care.
In the U.K., a new project called “Releasing Time to Care: Productive Ward Programme” is looking at innovative ways to improve the time management of the whole ward to allow for more time between nurses and patients.
Nursing Process Changes
The program was instituted by the National Health Service (NHS) Institute for Innovation and Improvement to allow all members of the health care team in a hospital to participate in instituting changes to improve patient care. The NHS project uses focused modules to walk proposed changes through a series of checklists and testing to see if improvement is achieved.
Tracking of the project changes returned a remarkable 400 hours of bedside nursing care released for the facilities. To put that into perspective, that is 10 full time nurses patient care time returned. The project saved the two wards involved in the pilot program about $60,000 over the course of the study.
Common Nursing Tasks Take Time
The program focuses on reviewing common, every day tasks performed by nurses and other staff members on the units in an effort to find places to streamline mundane tasks along the periphery of the patient care process. One particular change looking at the way laundry and linens were dispersed was found to save each nurse 96 hours over the course of one year.
A single change saves 96 hours of nursing time in a year!
What kind of impact would that make on your patients if you could have 96 hours back in your year?
I know many hospitals have cost and time saving improvement programs but many focus only on the cost savings as so much of what we do as RNs in the U.S. seems to devolve into dollars and cents. Returning the focus to getting more patient care time back helps us to return to what nursing care is really all about.
Change in Your Facility
I want to know how changes are instituted in your facility. Are you included in decision making that affects the way you and other RNs implement care or does the management hand down judgements from “on high?”
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