2021 Volume 59 Issue 1 Pages 7-13
Currently, healthcare workers have been very busy in their hospitals, and it is said that task shifting of healthcare workers will become more important in the near future. We also have discussed that the nursing workload is very heavy and their tasks should be shifted from nurses to other workers. Workload and workflow analyses are required to understand the actual nursing care situation. Therefore, time-motion study, a method of measuring nurses’actions and required time, has been conducted in nursing. However, time-motion study used so far requires the nurse to record his/her own nursing tasks or to record them with an investigator. Therefore, the time-motion study method is very burdensome in the clinical setting. On the other hand, hospital information systems (HISs) have been widely used in the clinical setting, and treatment orders by doctors and nursing orders are registered as medical treatment plans. At the same time, real-time execution input such as patient verification provides information of order execution including accurate execution time, which is accumulated as a medical record, and the data may represent most nursing tasks. In this study, for the purpose of improving nursing work, we tried to investigate the long-term nursing work volume using the order data in the hospital information system as a time-motion study. Specifically, we determined the nursing care time for each order data, and aggregated and analyzed the nursing care time by time of the day. As a result, it was possible to create some graphs showing the workload of specific nursing tasks by ward and to understand the task improvement effect of a ward.