UK: Nurses tied down by excess paperwork (Daily Telegraph)

If you do get national healthcare, I hope we can learn from them and do better than that.

We are already spending an outrageous amount of time charting. When the govt. and facilities keep asking us to do these "little" things that take 5 minutes, they add up. Five of these "things" take 30 min. and 12 take 1 hour. It seems that almost monthly we add something. I love how we add the fall assessment, the skin assessment, the home safety assessment, etc. The research shows these are benficial. I'd love to know under what conditions they were trialed. Many were derived by looking back at charts of people who fell or had whatever problem. If you get a good look at the patient, you probably don't need to fill out a checklist, you can figure it out. I will tell you what really works, each nurse having a manageable number of patients that they can really assess, really talk to, really interact w/ the pt. and S.O.'s. That works and that is good nursing care. It has better outcomes. There's research on that too. How come it is ignored? Nurses and patients are dissatisfied with all of this cover our backside, satisfy medicare, etc. etc. Peopel want to be cared about and nurses want to care for them. I get so sick of telling the staff, now we have to document this or that. Administrators are often unfazed, as they don't have to interrupt an already busy shift to add this extra documentation or ask these questions of people who have demntia and don't know their own names. Our computer charting has so very many rules almost no one does it completely right, because no one can remember all of the rules. I do feel everyone is entitled to healthcare, but to have the govt. running it seems to be a nightmare.