Nursing Assessments Mater

Re-thinking the nursing assessment form by reducing the time and effort it takes to complete, giving more time to patient care.

Live

Timeline

2021 - ongoing

Team

Careful Nursing Working
Group
NCAD

Partners

HSE Spark Innovation Programme

Challenge

Over 25,000 patients are admitted to the Mater Hospital every year, each one requiring a nurse’s assessment. This nursing assessment follows the journey of the patient through the hospital and captures critical information about their priorities
of care.

The current form is 19 pages long and filling it out is time consuming and cumbersome. The layout lacks an intuitive flow. This makes it both difficult to complete and read back to get an understanding of the patients journey.

Outcome

The team reduced the number of pages from 19 down to 5. Repetition of information has been carefully reduced. The layout of the form has been redesigned with usability principles in mind.

The new form will save time, improve nurses’ workflow and communication, ultimately enabling them to spend more time with patients. The shorter form will also be cheaper to produce and more environmentally friendly, compared to
the original.

Process

During Design Week 2022, two Masters design students started off with primary research to better understand the existing process of the nursing form and the various users involved.

This research involved the following steps;
‍

Interviews with key hospital staff Carrying out a research survey Card sorting exercises Observation of a hospital ward Form analysis by nurses.
The students also conducted secondary research by looking into nursing forms that exist in other hospitals, as well as best practices for form design.
Through their research, the students learned that the cover page is most important and often is the only page nurses read, so they put the most important information on the front. In addition, they included a primary and secondary survey that prioritises the questions that nurses need to ask within the first 24 hours of a patients stay in hospital.
Since then, the design team from Mater Transformation, NCAD and Mater Nursing have iterated the design of the form, in preparation for testing in Q3 2023, prior to full roll out.