A new survey shows that nurses are spending more time on indirect patient care activities like paperwork, traveling to supply rooms and entering medication orders than in the past.
One of the consequences of nurses spending less time directly caring for patients is that more than half of the nurses surveyed said they weren’t satisfied with the scheduling of staff at their facility, according to a new survey from Jackson Healthcare, a hospital staffing company.
According to the survey, 78 percent of nurses reported spending at least two hours of their day on indirect patient care, up from 73 percent two years earlier.
The most common indirect patient-care activities include: documenting information in multiple locations; completing logs, checklists and collecting data; and traveling to equipment supply and dirty utility rooms.
To boost the amount of time that nurses spend caring directly for patients, Jackson Healthcare makes three suggestions: more efficient, simplified charting; increased ancillary support; and reduced nurse-to-patient ratios.
The survey is based on data collected from 420 nursing professionals last year.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
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