Tackling the burden of bureaucracy

If the health service is to reduce ‘cumbersome bureaucracy’, and release time to care, significant changes are required. KATE WOODHEAD RGN DMS reports

Since the beginning of April this year, NHS healthcare infrastructure has become considerably more complex. Each provider will have more organisations with whom to collaborate and be monitored by. Data management will need to become more streamlined in order to cope with the increasing demands and additionally the Secretary of State for Health called for a paperless NHS by 2018.1 Robert Francis QC recommended that there is a need to accept common information practices, and to feed performance information into shared databases for monitoring purposes. He also set a common set of principles for the introduction of electronic patient information systems plus a further multitude of recommendations regarding access to data and monitoring of quality and performance data.2 Reducing the burden of bureaucracy has, for many years, been the wish of every front line healthcare worker – who may spend hours, every day, recording information about the care delivered. I certainly remember trying desperately to maintain concentration, and not fall asleep, while writing the night report after 11 hours on duty (many years ago). I am not suggesting that this kind of documentation is excessive to requirement, but, since that time, demands for data both for internal organisational monitoring and external agencies for a variety of purposes have increased many fold. Some of this demand for data not only duplicates what has been previously requested, but it also seems never ending. A recent survey by IBM reported that nurses spend up to 2.5 million hours each week on clerical and administrative tasks, showing that the amount of paperwork has almost doubled, in the past five years.3

 NHS Confederation Review