Documentation?

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Hi all!

I am applying for home health positions, but something has me a lottle worried. I keep seeing posts about how much documentation there is, and how you are spending 12 hours every day between seeing pts and documenting. Is this typical? How many hours do you spend documenting total/ how many hours per patient?

Thanks so much for any replies!

Our new nurses covering a lot of miles aren't working 12 hours a day. Can't say you won't have some 9 and 10 hour days but it's not 12 hours every day.

ETA There is a tremendous amount of paperwork, being unsupervised with ease of abuse Medicare heavily regulates reimbursement of services and we not onky have to demonstrate quality of care but support need for services meeting several criteria.

I always have time to pee though :-)

How long a typical day takes depends a variety of things. First the obvious, number of patients, distance to travel to patients, complexity of the visits, etc. But there are other factors as well... One depending on how prepared you are for the day. I keep lots of extra supplies in my car, and make sure to restock each time I'm at the office. There are some days that I never even step foot in the office which saves on time because that's one less stop, plus it seems like I always get held up when I'm there dealing with one thing or another. Another is being sure to check and recheck orders either the night before or first thing in the morning. When I first started with HH I don't know how many times I would make trips back and forth to the office because I didn't have what I needed and I didn't read all the orders so I wasn't prepared for something I needed to do. Definitely call patients the night before because if you don't then you'll end up scrambling around all day because this patient ran to the pharmacy and won't be back for a couple of hours, and that patient is at an appt then you end up with a handful of patients that all need to be seen after 3pm, or something crazy like that anyway. Also, make templates! As far as documentation, this has been the biggest time saver, hands down!!! For every skill I do, I've made a template and just have them saved so I can copy and paste then fill in the blanks. I've done the same thing with all my teaching, I've made templates for those as well. I didn't sit down one day and type them all, which you could do if you wanted, I just made/make them as I needed/need them. I feel like I'm forgetting some things.... If I think of them, I'll comment again. Until then, hope some of this helps!

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