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Nurses could double the amount of time they spend on direct patient care and slash unnecessary paperwork thanks to £50m investment in a project to improve efficiency on wards, Health Secretary Alan Johnson announced today.
The Productive Ward programme, designed by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, empowers nurses to look at how their ward is organised and make changes that allow them to spend more time with patients. Often these are very simple ideas, such as altering patient handover time, reorganising storage facilities and making better use of data. The programme has been piloted in four trusts and there are 10 learning partners, one in each SHA. A further two trusts are rolling the programme out across all of their wards. Evidence from the pilot sites shows the Productive Ward can: - Double the amount of time nurses spend on patient care;
- Cut handover time by a third;
- Reduce medicine round time by 63 per cent;
- Cut meal wastage rates from 7 per cent to 1 per cent. Around 80 percent of Trusts have already signed up to the Productive Ward programme. However, only two trusts are rolling it out across all their wards. Alan Johnson said: "When I visited Nottingham City Hospital last year, I was deeply impressed by their Productive Ward Pilot. By taking small but significant steps, nurses have freed up time to make enormous improvements to patient care. "The programme works because nurses have total ownership. The power is in their hands to make changes. I want to work with the RCN and ward sisters to encourage more Trusts to put the principles of the Productive Ward programme into action across all their wards, increasing the time nurses spend with patients and enabling them to do the job they were trained for." Dr. Peter Carter, Chief Executive & General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said: "More than anything, nurses wish to provide high quality care. The RCN is very pleased to say that the national rollout of the Productive Ward programme will help to do just that. Frontline staff work on wards, day in day out and are best placed to devise and implement the changes that will allow them to spend more time at the bedside caring for patients. The RCN would welcome further government moves to ensure that future changes to the delivery of healthcare are locally-led and clinically driven." Thanks to record investment over the past 10 years, there are 80,000 more nurses working in the NHS. Their role has changed significantly in that time. With better training opportunities, nurses have greater responsibility and carry out more specialist work. As their roles change, the day-to-day organisation of wards must change to free up as much time as possible for nurses to spend on patient care. Empowering staff to drive forward improvements in the health service on the frontline, rather than having change imposed on them from Whitehall, is a cornerstone of Lord Darzi's ongoing review of the NHS. The Productive Ward programme demonstrates the benefits of this approach to health reform - clinically driven and locally led. |
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