What is task management and how will it help tackle NHS waiting lists?
By Dr Jo Garland
More patients than ever are waiting for hospital treatment. Prior to the pandemic, there were already 4.43 million patients in England on a waiting list for care. As of September 2023, the waiting list for hospital treatment stands at almost 7.8 million. Behind this number are patients who need to be assessed and their treatment options discussed and initiated. The delays have clinical implications for patients in terms of disease progression and also the anxiety of an uncertain outcome.
NHS staff are exhausted, burnt out and struggling with an increased workload.
Reasons for the long waiting lists include residual effects of the pandemic, a significantly reduced workforce and a lack of community care delaying patient discharge. It is not possible to immediately recruit enough healthcare professionals and existing staff are battling with excessive demands, so it is critical to optimise what already exists.
Give staff the right tools to do their job
There is a huge burden of administrative and time-consuming processes reducing time spent on direct patient care. Staff waste hours calling or bleeping busy colleagues to share or discuss information and chasing results from multiple digital systems. Coordinating care within and between multidisciplinary teams is inefficient, frustrating and often unsafe.
Every NHS staff member should have access to a device that helps them manage their workload and coordinate care. An easily accessible digital list of patients that they are looking after and the tasks required, with all necessary information, integrated with other relevant systems such as EHRs or diagnostic testing platforms is essential.
What is a task?
A task describes a piece of activity that needs to be done for a patient. It includes details of the action to be carried out, for whom it needs to be done, which person or team has been assigned the task, when it needs to be done by, location of the patient and degree of urgency. Tasks can range from a clinical review, specific treatment, request for a diagnostic test, or planning discharge.
A task management platform like Infinity allows healthcare professionals to better manage their workload as they can easily see and prioritise their task list. All the team has visibility in real-time to the tasks being done, the status of each task, and the activity of all the team. Managers or senior clinicians can support and reallocate tasks and redirect resources as required at the touch of a button.
All information is up to date, in one place, and shared with the right people. This reduces unnecessary calls and bleeps and critically, no task is ever missed. Pre-set searches can be performed at any time and allow immediate results, highlighting any incomplete tasks; unallocated tasks; particular tasks in particular locations; or any other useful criteria needed for safe and efficient task completion and resource management.
How task management helps NHS staff
Task management is the process of creating, prioritising, assigning, and tracking tasks. It ensures that the right person is doing the right thing, for the right person, at the right time, in the right order. Data collected at such a granular level provides insight for teams and organisations. It can inform how they direct activity or be used as an audit trail.
Tasks can be automated. For example, after surgery a patient could have tasks set up automatically that request medication for them to take home; community teams activated; and the relevant person or team, such as a pharmacist, can be notified. Or admission details such as a diagnosis or responsible consultant can trigger tasks automatically. A diagnosis of pneumonia can create tasks to request an X-Ray, check oxygen saturation or ask for a physiotherapy review.
Joining up multidisciplinary teams
Multidisciplinary teams are looking after the same patients and often have different information, logged on different systems or on paper, all key to managing the care of patients. Systems are not joined up, so care is not joined up. Tasks are not visible to the whole team, so decisions about diagnoses, investigations, and treatments, are made without the whole picture. This clearly leads to delays and clinical safety issues.
Digital task management allows different teams to communicate in and across sites, particularly between hospital and community staff, making for quicker, more informed decision-making and breakdown existing siloes.
Ward and site managers have full oversight of all activity so that they can see in real-time when patients are being discharged or changing location, and efficiently coordinate bed management. They can intervene in scenarios where beds may be blocked due to an incomplete task and activate the right person or team to carry out the necessary task and improve patient flow.
Will it help tackle the backlog?
It will be challenging to keep up with rising demand for services and growing staff shortages even with the NHS ambitious catch up programme. However an operational tool, like Infinity, to manage tasks across a hospital can improve efficiency in many ways. Additionally, providing staff with a good digital tool that is easy to use and requires minimal training can only enhance work satisfaction and has the potential to aid staff retention. Visibility of colleagues working together creates a sense of a team that has been eroded by shift work and constantly changing rotas.
How task management will support staff to tackle long waitlists:
More efficient caseload management allowing staff to make better use of their time with capacity to see more patients
Better clinical communication across teams and sites enabling staff to make quicker, more informed decisions
All information is accessible in one place, saving staff hours of time in contacting colleagues via phone, email, bleep or in-person meetings
Real-time visibility of all activity, allowing managers to remove blockages, improving patient flow, from admission to discharge.
One direct way where Infinity is having an impact on the backlog is through transforming outpatients in Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Infinity has integrated with the trust’s patient administration system (PAS) to digitise patient initiated follow-up appointments(PIFU). Instead of routine follow-up appointments at set times, patients can request an appointment or contact their clinical team when they want or need to, via the patient engagement platform, DrDoctor.
For patients that clinicians want to review regularly, questionnaires asking about symptoms can be sent to patients at agreed intervals specific to each cohort. Using Infinity, staff can easily see when patients have been sent questionnaires, when they are completed and ready for review and crucially if they have not been completed. Pre-set searches highlight patients who don’t engage and they can be contacted to ascertain the reason why. No patients are lost to follow up and useful data is collected about patients on individual clinical pathways. The reduction in unnecessary follow-up appointments will significantly benefit both staff and patients, increase capacity needed to see patients that need to be seen and reduce waiting times.
Implementing Infinity is quick and can have a huge impact immediately. The growing backlog and rising strain on staff is concerning. Having better tools to allow teams to work together, coordinate care and improve conditions for healthcare professionals and patients is imperative.