Paperwork drawers - Keep it simple and standardise

Problem to be addressed Hospital at night team, new doctors and visiting teams often find it difficult to find key items of paperwork such as continuation sheets, anaesthetic chart and fluid prescription charts. On each ward, they are kept in different random drawers. Nurses are routinely interrupted by doctors asking for where things are kept.

Test of change After testing the change, each ward now has a standard column of drawers with yellow numbered labels for paperwork frequently used by medical staff. No expenses were incurred; we just relabeled and reshuffled the existing drawers.

Outcome We sent two new medical students to 5 wards to look for three commonly used pieces of paper before and after our test of change.

Time taken to find these items reduced by 90%. More time to care.

In addition, nurses were no longer disturbed to help find these items.

Learning Working across microsystems can be challenging. Selling change based on how it can help everyone (e.g. reduce disturbances and increase time to care) made it much easier.

Thank you to the nurses and ward clerks for their help and feedback. This work could not have been possible without everyone’s collaboration. Project by Elmudathir Osman (paediatric SHO) and Alexander Martin (Newcastle University SSC medical student) under the supervision of Dr. Yincent Tse (consultant). Great North Children's Hospital, Newcastle Upon Tyne