Red tape keeping nurses from nursing

1 May 08
Patients are losing out as nurses are forced to spend more than a million hours a week on paperwork, according to the Royal College of Nursing.

02 May 2008

Patients are losing out as nurses are forced to spend more than a million hours a week on paperwork, according to the Royal College of Nursing.

RCN general secretary Peter Carter called for the urgent recruitment of more ward clerks to ease the pressure of bureaucracy.

Speaking at the RCN annual conference in Bournemouth on April 28, Carter said the government could use some of last year's £2bn NHS surplus to free nurses from administrative work.

An ICM poll of 1,752 nurses showed they spent almost a fifth of their working hours on non-essential paperwork. Some 88% said that in the past five years, they had been doing more tasks that did not require professional judgement.

The survey showed that 170,000 full-time nurses spent an average 7.3 hours a week on paperwork, and 100,000 part-timers spent 3.9 hours a week. It concluded that 'the total time spent on non-essential paperwork for nurses providing direct care to patients is up to 1.6 million hours a week'.

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