Improving the workflow of nursing assistants at a general hospital in Japan

Transferring non-specialised tasks from registered nurses to nursing assistants may help registered nurses focus on specialised tasks. Optimising the workflow of nursing assistants by making their tasks more efficient may improve problems associated with the shortage of registered nurses. The nursing assistants at our hospital were stressed about referring inpatients to outpatient specialty clinics. Therefore, we initiated a project to optimise the referral process and reduce the time spent by nursing assistants on this task, with the collaboration of physicians, registered nurses and administrative assistants. The Training for Effective & Efficient Action in Medical Service–Better Process (TEAMS-BP) method, which was developed by modifying the Japanese Training Within Industry–Job Method, was used for the optimisation process. TEAMS-BP teaches users how to break each task down into its individual components, to scrutinise the details, and then to develop new processes by eliminating, combining, rearranging and simplifying tasks. At baseline, each referral took 10 min and was performed 39 times over 10 days in six wards. The first TEAMS-BP cycle did not yield satisfactory results for the nursing assistants. In the second TEAMS-BP cycle, participants included inpatient and outpatient physicians, registered nurses and administrative assistants. As a result, we changed the referral process from paper to electronic records and streamlined referrals that were ordered by inpatient physicians to outpatient physicians. The use of this method saved the equivalent of 175 hours of nursing assistants’ time per year at no additional cost. If we had been able to define the referral process as an interdisciplinary task and show the merits to each department from the beginning, we may have been able to form the interprofessional team in the first TEAMS-BP. Improving the efficiency of nursing assistants can allow other professionals to focus on their specialised tasks more effectively.