Dataset Information

Reducing time spent by junior doctors on call performing routine tasks at weekends.

ABSTRACT: At the Northern General Hospital, there are sixteen medical wards, spread over approximately half a mile. Weekend care for inpatients on these wards is provided by a team of four junior doctors, of different levels of training. We undertook a quality improvement project to reduce the amount of time junior doctors spent performing routine tasks at weekends. This may increase their available time for direct patient care. The study was performed over a period of nine weeks on two medical wards - Diabetes & Endocrine (W1) and Care of the Elderly Rehabilitation (W2). We monitored the bleeps received by the covering junior doctors during the weekend daytime shifts from the two study wards. We noted that a proportion of bleeps were routine tasks that could have been performed during weekday working hours. We also noted that W2 recorded fewer bleeps than W1 ward. This seemed to be because W2 batched junior doctors' jobs together. Firstly, we attempted to reduce the amount of routine work left undone each weekend. We provided a poster to remind Junior Doctors to complete such work during the week. Secondly, on W1 we replicated the job-batching system already in place on W2. A Doctors' Book was introduced in which nursing staff recorded the tasks that needed doing. This saved them from having to bleep the doctor repeatedly. The two changes resulted in a reduction in the number of bleeps generated by each ward and the number of visits required by the Junior Doctors to W1. Simple changes can reduce the amount of time junior doctors spend performing routine work at weekends. We implemented two such changes and achieved a reduction in the number of bleeps experienced by junior doctors and the number of times they had to return to one ward.

SUBMITTER: Ibrahim W

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4652691 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Reducing time spent by junior doctors on call performing routine tasks at weekends.

Ibrahim Wadah W Lin Simeng S

BMJ quality improvement reports 20130821 1

At the Northern General Hospital, there are sixteen medical wards, spread over approximately half a mile. Weekend care for inpatients on these wards is provided by a team of four junior doctors, of different levels of training. We undertook a quality improvement project to reduce the amount of time junior doctors spent performing routine tasks at weekends. This may increase their available time for direct patient care. The study was performed over a period of nine weeks on two medical wards - Di ...[more]

PMID: 26734161

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundFirst-year doctors found that during out-of-hours shifts they were being delayed and distracted from reviewing potentially sick/deteriorating patients by a high volume of prescribing tasks. This predominately consisted of oral anticoagulation prescribing and rewrites of drug charts. We hoped that if we could reduce this burden of "inappropriate prescribing tasks", we could not only improve junior doctors' job satisfaction and opportunities for training but also give them more time for patient reviews.MethodsThree weekends were initially audited to quantify the number of "inappropriate prescribing tasks" using data from the hospital's computerized task assigning system. On three subsequent weekends, a checklist was handed out to the ward teams on Friday mornings. This checklist was designed to encourage the day teams to check that drug charts would not need oral anticoagulation or rewriting over the weekend.ResultsAn overall reduction in "inappropriate prescribing tasks" of 46% with a specific reduction in inappropriate oral anticoagulation prescribing of 65% was observed. Inappropriate drug chart rewrites were reduced by 30%. The reduction in the mean number of pre-intervention inappropriate prescribing tasks (as a percentage of total prescribing tasks) and the post-intervention mean was 6.94% (95% confidence interval -0.54 to 14.42, p-value=0.062).ConclusionImproved job satisfaction and a perceived reduced workload were noted from post-intervention qualitative surveys. While improved patient safety directly resulting from this intervention is more difficult to establish, and the observed reduction in inappropriate prescribing was only approaching statistical significance, our colleagues commented in post-intervention feedback that they felt they had more time, and felt less pressured, while attending patients. The workload of junior doctors can exert a significant effect on patient care, and simple measures can alleviate this burden. Furthermore, computerized hospital task management systems are an underutilized source of data for audit and quality improvement.

Dataset Information

Reducing time spent by junior doctors on call performing routine tasks at weekends.

Publications

Reducing time spent by junior doctors on call performing routine tasks at weekends.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets