“How do we use the time?” – an observational study measuring the task time distribution of nurses in psychiatric care

Abstract

BackgroundThe nurse’s primary task in psychiatric care should be to plan for the patient’s care in cooperation with the patient and spend the time needed to build a relationship. Psychiatric care nurses however claim that they lack the necessary time to communicate with patients. To investigate the validity of such claims, this time-motion study aimed at identifying how nurses working at inpatient psychiatric wards distribute their time between a variety of tasks during a working day.MethodsDuring the period of December 2015 and February 2016, a total of 129 h and 23 min of structured observations of 12 nurses were carried out at six inpatient wards at one psychiatric clinic in southern Sweden. Time, frequency of tasks and number of interruptions were recorded and analysed using descriptive statistics.ResultsAdministering drugs or medications accounted for the largest part of the measured time (17.5%) followed by indirect care (16%). Relatively little time was spent on direct care, the third largest category in the study (15.3%), while an unexpectedly high proportion of time (11.3%) was spent on ward related tasks. Nurses were also interrupted in 75% of all medication administering tasks.ConclusionsNurses working in inpatient psychiatric care spend little time in direct contact with the patients and medication administration is interrupted very often. As a result, it is difficult to establish therapeutic relationships with patients. This is an area of concern for both patient safety and nurses’ job satisfaction.

The scope of nursing practice in a psychiatric unit: A time and motion study

“…There is a great deal of variability among studies that have analysed the distribution of psychiatric nurses' activities (Hodek et al, 2011;Antinaho et al, 2015Antinaho et al, , 2017Goulter et al, 2015;McAllister & McCrae, 2017). Only one study used a time and motion method (Glantz et al, 2019). The originality of our study lies in the adaptation of a theoretical nursing model that describes specific nursing tasks and allows comparisons based on reliable data.…”

“…These agreed that nurses spent the majority of their time on indirect care, without their patients (52% on average) (Goulter et al, 2015 ; Hodek et al, 2011 ; Sharac et al, 2010 ). Only one study, which used a time and motion (T&M) method to determine how psychiatric nurses used their time (Glantz et al, 2019 ), was able to show that medically delegated tasks and indirect care without the patient represented the longest time segments in nurses’ shifts (161min/day). This study used 11 predetermined task categories guided by the Work Observation Method By Activity Timing (WOMBAT) protocol.…”

Implementation of IoT in Patient Health Monitoring and Healthcare for Hospitals

“…Other than the pandemic, [4] claimed that nurses spent the most time on medication related tasks, such as documentation and preparations as well as indirect patient care. The current process is not efficient as nurses need to manually check on the patient's status as well as administering medication for the patient when necessary [5].…”

“…The current process is not efficient as nurses need to manually check on the patient's status as well as administering medication for the patient when necessary [5]. That could waste the hospital's resources such as money and time which could be used to improve the care provided to patients [4,5]. This research will propose an IoT based health monitoring and healthcare system using ZigBee, RFID and Wi-Fi to improve efficiency and reduce excess miscellaneous work done by the medical staff.…”

What Are the Core Competencies of a Mental Health Nurse? Protocol for a Concept Mapping Study

“…Mental health nurses provide care and treatment to patients in a variety of inpatient and community settings [ 6 , 7 ]. The majority of the mental health nurse’s working day should be spent providing direct patient care [ 8 ]. The competencies which nurses can apply during their time with patients may impact clinical outcomes [ 1 , 9 ].…”