Health visiting teams are able to spend more time with the families they support, after revolutionising the way they work.
Time spent on filling in paperwork has been halved when carrying out assessments with babies aged nine to 12-months, with staggering time savings also being made with other baby and child development checks.
Previously, colleagues in the Health Visiting Service at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, juggled multiple time-consuming forms while with families and when completing paperwork after visits, often losing precious time to documentation.
The new system consolidates multiple forms into one, resulting in the nine to 12-month assessment form taking 21 minutes as opposed to 42, new birth paperwork taking 34 minutes rather than 45, three minutes being saved on antenatal checks and the admin time taken with two-year reviews slashed by 14 minutes.
It might not sound like much, but adding up time saved on just three of the checks over a year is 10,800 hours saved, the equivalent of nine full time posts. Cutting down on time-consuming admin tasks also means practitioners can focus on what matters most — supporting the families who need them.
Health Visiting Programme Manager Sonia Hedegaard said: “Colleagues were saying that form filling was an issue, telling us that it was taking a long time to write up records. It was taking far longer than the time they had allocated for this, so we knew something had to change.
“Practitioners played a key role in shaping the changes, telling us what would work better for them. At the same time, we needed to make sure the new system met clinical safety requirements.
“Colleagues have said the new forms are life changing. Early feedback suggests the changes have reduced stress and improved staff health and wellbeing, along with staff retention.
“Since the new forms were introduced we have continued to listen to practitioners and to make small changes if practitioners suggest further improvements.”
Training and support were key to making sure there was a smooth transition to the new forms, which sit on the trust’s electronic patient record system, Rio.
Find out more about the quality improvement (QI) project on the KCHFT QI website: https://qi.kentcht.nhs.uk/reducing-time-on-admin-in-our-health-visiting-service/
Click anywhere on the image below to read and download this project summary