Health visiting teams are able to spend more time with the families they support, after revolutionising the way they work.
Time spent on filling in paperwork has been halved when carrying out assessments with babies aged nine to 12-months, with substantial time savings also being made with other key developmental checks for babies and young children.
Previously, health visitors at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, juggled multiple time-consuming forms and progress notes – both during home visits and afterwards – often losing valuable time to paperwork. Now, those forms have been consolidated into a single, more efficient format.
The results are impressive:
- Nine to 12-month assessment: Reduced from 42 minutes to 21 minutes
- New birth visit documentation: Reduced from 45 minutes to 34 minutes
- Antenatal checks: Saving of three minutes per visit
- Two-year reviews: record keeping time cut by 14 minutes.
It might not sound like much, but the impact for the Health Visiting Service is huge. Across just three of the key checks, the total time saved over a year amounts to 10,800 hours — the equivalent of nine full-time posts. That’s time now being redirected back into care.
Sonia Hedegaard, Health Visiting Programme Manager, said: “Practitioners told us that record keeping was taking far too long — often more than the time they had scheduled. We knew something had to change.
“Frontline teams were instrumental in designing the improvements. Their insight shaped the forms to ensure they were practical and user-friendly, while still meeting clinical safety standards.”
The new documentation sits within the trust’s electronic patient record system, Rio. A strong focus on training and support helped ensure a smooth transition.
Feedback from colleagues has been overwhelmingly positive.
Sonia added: “Colleagues have said the new forms are life changing. Early feedback suggests the changes have reduced stress and improved staff health and wellbeing, along with staff retention.”
Find out more about the quality improvement (QI) project on the KCHFT QI website.
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