Problem
• Save nursing staff time taken on documentation and releasing time to care in response to COVID-19 measures in place
• Improving documentation
• A staff member from Neustadt/Welton ward initially raised concerns about the standard of documentation, thereby raising the impetus to focus on it
Aim
• Reduce paperwork/keeping it safe/making it work for the nursing staff
Plan
• Staff tried this focus a few years ago as part of a ‘prescription of care’ project and it was going to be rolled out. A CQC visit was due and the process was paused. A lot of work had been done and staff agreed this was what was required and another opportunity to present itself in a similar format
Benefits
• More open awareness of how basic we have to be to aid understanding and also ensuring staff support is in place so they know what is expected of them. This is the light of the new ways of working.
• Anecdotal comment: ‘It’s so simple it’s uncomfortable’.
• More time is spent with patients, and staff feel more hopeful now.
Measures
• Yet to see outcomes as 50% capacity currently but the team want to measure timing of paperwork completion pre and post use.
Resources / team
• Doing work in the background to continue with documentation after COVID ie tissue viability to have steering group from admission/discharge/SDM/interest in doc
• Staff at another Trust site heard about the project and are now asking for the paperwork too. Plan for next print to include them aswell and follow the standardising of rollout.
• Key learning
o Hope that any future projects could work at the speed in which this one has, forcing us to work and think differently, questioning was the previous way always the right way.
o Reduce meetings - were they necessary? (we involve too many people which makes it lose impetus)
Tips for others
• Use of positive language that something might change
• Support innovation
Sam Torgersen, Quality Matron & Lauren Hansord, Junior Sister, Waddington Ward