Written Answers from the Department of Health and Social Care – Administration records

This Answer is not very informative at a time when there are issues over how much record keeping and form filling is needed.

 

The Department of Health and Social Care has provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (123840):

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will review the administration and record keeping hospital doctors need to do to ease their jobs whilst recording important information. (123840)

Tabled on: 16 January 2023

Answer:
Will Quince:

Administration and record keeping are overlapping but slightly separate matters. Some hospitals employ doctors’ assistants to help with administrative work, especially for doctors working on wards. There are varying practices across different National Health Service organisations regarding who records information in records. The Records Management Code of Practice for Health and Social Care 2021 is a guide to the practice of managing records. All health and care employees are responsible for managing records appropriately. Records must be managed in accordance with the law and each organisation should have a designated member of staff who leads on records management.

The answer was submitted on 23 Jan 2023 at 17:59.

7 Comments

  1. a-tracy
    January 25, 2023

    27 Apr 2008 — “NHS nurses spend more than a million hours a week on paperwork, poll shows.” Guardian

    13 Jul 2010 — “Nurses are spending less than half their time looking after patients because they are overwhelmed by paperwork and form-filling.”

    “by JI Westbrook · 2011 · Cited by 428 — Nurses spent 37.0%[95%CI: 34.5, 39.3] of their time with patients, which did not change in year 3” bmc

    Hands-off ministerial management isn’t working, Will! Some suggestions, Change the job title from nurse to medic, get more men hired to balance out and give more true diversity, hire over ’50s, and check how many over 50’s were newly employed the last year 2022 to ensure there is no age discrimination; we are repeatedly told these people are struggling to be hired, the private sector hires them.

  2. Bloke
    January 25, 2023

    ‘Important information’ is key. Many records involve much time to take and sort through but are worthless unless they serve useful purpose. Records should conform to patient needs. Tolerating varying practices does accommodate those, but in so large a national organisation the number of variations loosely allowed is haphazard. If they weren’t then Will Quince would have some hope of providing a sensible meaningful answer, but he can’t.

  3. Bryan Harris
    January 25, 2023

    Administration and record keeping are overlapping but slightly separate matters. Some hospitals employ doctors’ assistants to help with administrative work, especially for doctors working on wards. There are varying practices across different National Health Service organisations regarding who records information in records. The Records Management Code of Practice for Health and Social Care 2021 is a guide to the practice of managing records. All health and care employees are responsible for managing records appropriately. Records must be managed in accordance with the law and each organisation should have a designated member of staff who leads on records management.

    This is so typical of the responses most of us receive from our own MPs when asking them a serious question — Evasive and copied from a script – Most MPs it seems have no intention of investigating anything themselves, when the CS can provide non-answers at the touch of a button. So it seems the way with the CS when responding to MPs

    Time the CS was replaced by a private company that could do the job.

  4. Mickey Taking
    January 25, 2023

    You asked ‘if he will review the administration and record keeping hospital doctors need to do to EASE their jobs whilst recording important information.’
    Answer was a side step of delegation, with no hint that anything is planned to be done.
    Abdication of responsibities of Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.

  5. Mark
    January 25, 2023

    I tried looking at the ONS data on leading causes of death by age cohort. This was previously produced annually, if a little in arrears, and I can download data for 2001 to 2018. It has not been updated since March 2020.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/causesofdeath/articles/leadingcausesofdeathuk/2001to2018

    Surely this is fundamental to considering priorities for the NHS? Why fail to update the data?

  6. mancunius
    January 25, 2023

    That impudent answer by an uncivil servant means ‘Dunno, and can’t be bothered to find out’.

  7. a-tracy
    January 27, 2023

    We have all this social care, disability benefits, yet we have people that lie dead mummified in social rental flats for over three years. Seriously John how does this get missed? Shouldn’t there be a rule that if someone’s disability benefits are stopped their next of kin is alerted in case they aren’t capable of sorting it our for themselves.

    Three years and the landlords never check on the inside of their flat. Not the first report of this in this year and we’re told housing is a premium. A woman with mental health issues is never checked upon by her care team who registered her disabled. Things need to change. Woking, poor Laura left neglected by family/friends and our housing association/council? Which one of those owned her home and shouldn’t we have a rule that all housing association/council housing have an indoor check once per year, to test the fire alarm, the state of the place, get a gas certificate (private landlords do)? Was her housing benefit paid all that time and did the HA just take that out on direct debit or something? What about her council tax was this still paid? Don’t a certain number of letters get a home face to face visit?

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