Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) make up one tenth of the NHS workforce. Almost 70,000 work in the UK delivering over four million client and patient interactions per week. AHPs work in the community, in hospital trusts, in peoples’ homes or for specialist providers helping people at every stage of their life.
Given the range of professions under the AHP umbrella and their varying working environments, AHP documentation requirements vary greatly. Regardless, AHPs must keep full, clear, and accurate records for everyone they provide a service to. This can prove problematic: inadequate hardware for community-based staff, a lack of access to real-time data or having to write notes in front of patients. All can impact negatively on the patient interaction.
Nuance convened a roundtable to discuss the impact of clinical documentation on AHPs. We wanted to investigate the challenges they face day-to-day in creating, reviewing, updating and sharing clinical documentation. We also explored how they currently manage the documentation process. The roundtable was chaired by Alicia Ridout, Chief Allied Health Professions Officer (CAHPO) and Digital Innovator of the year 2017.
Prior to the roundtable, Nuance held a tweetchat via @WeAHPs to explore key areas for discussion. According to a poll run during the tweetchat, just under half of those involved said they spent one to two hours on patient record keeping every day. Twenty eight per cent spend two to three hours. Documentation also has an impact on AHP work-life balance. Forty per cent reported that completing documentation often resulted in them going home late at the end of the working day.
The tweetchat gave us a valuable insight into AHPs daily challenges. During roundtable we discussed the issues of IT infrastructure, patient record template design, the purpose of documentation and how it fits into the wider NHS landscape. Perhaps, most importantly, we discussed how AHPs could get back to spending more time with their patients and less time documenting care.
Sharing patient documentation across organisational boundaries and between professionals creates several challenges including:
Recommendations from the roundtable discussion aligned neatly with NHS England’s publication ‘AHPs into Action’ . The report and the roundtable recognises that AHPs need to access tools to support their use of informatics. Use of these tools should form part of core training, registration and daily work.
In all there were 10 recommendations arising from the roundtable including:
Learn what AHPs have to say about the role technology has in helping them overcome the challenges of documenting patient/client care
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