1.4. Workload analysis tool
This is software that analyses primary care Read codes and presents the practice with visual information about their workload. This can be used to inform decision-making and capacity planning.
Benefits
- Live information about your clinical and administrative activity
- Can be used to develop plans for better use of skill mix within the practice
- Evidence-based data
- Data quality monitoring
- Identifies individual clinicians workload
- Offers the ability to benchmark data locally, regionally or nationally.
Drawbacks
- Training needs in order to understand and utilise the data
- Changing clinicians’ recording habits
- The resource required to act on the information provided by the data to improve services
- Gaining agreement to share the data with other organisations.
Costs
Informatica Systems Ltd currently (at June 2009) offers the Workload Analysis Tool for a £150 initial set-up fee and£500 a year for the licence, maintenance and support. Other systems may be available and practices should carry out their own research before committing to a particular provider.
What questions could it help answer?
The practice manager
- Do you know how many patients presented last month with urinary tract infections or with musculo-skeletal problems?
- Are the patients seeing the most appropriate person?
- What is the impact of annual leave on individual’s workload?
The nursing team
- Is the long-term condition workload rising or is this just a perception?
- How has my workload increased over the past few months?
- Do we need to put together a business case for more nursing hours?
- Are we seeing more older people since the community nursing team restricted their service?
- Is our nurse practitioner seeing the most appropriate patients?
- Can we train our healthcare support worker to take on other tasks?
GPs
- How do my disease registers compare with our predicted prevalence?
- How are the registrars and F2 doctors managing their workload?
- Are they seeing the most appropriate patients?
- Can I delegate some of my workload to a different clinician?
- Could we use a community pharmacist to help with medication reviews?
- Would a physiotherapist provide a more cost-effective service for patients who present with musculo-skeletal problems?
Practice-based commissioners
- What is the level of demand for physiotherapy services within our cluster?
- How does this vary between the practices?
- How many of our patients are using the out-of-hours service? In what age range are these attendees?
- What percentage of the workload do long-term conditions represent? Could we manage this workload differently?
- We would like to consider and draw up a business case to commission our own district nursing service, what is the evidence to support this?
