Countdown to “Care Contact Time”.
On the 4th of June each ward area will be required to undertake a contact time study for 12 hours which will include each member of the ward team. The Care Contact Time study is intended to identify the percentage of time that is spent by nurses on delivering direct and indirect patient care. It is a national requirement for all Trusts to complete the assessment of contact time by this summer.
I realise this is a big ask for all teams and we are putting in support to ward managers and ward clerks to carry out this assessment. During this month we are providing training to each ward are to use an “Activity Clocks” tool which we trialled during April.
I hope that the information we generate will be useful in planning how we make the most of the clinical time available to us. Other trusts have used the findings from their contact time studies to make improvements to ward rounds and discharge processes which have reduced indirect care time for nurses by 7%. They have also done things such as review the amount of blood tests requested and reduced this by 50% when it was noted that a large proportion of time for staff on an early shift was dedicated to blood sampling.
This will be an opportunity for us to really look at what we do and the difference this makes to the compassionate care we provide to patients.