Patient Acuity and Workload Management

Functions

The TrendCare solution:

  • Provides a wide-scope of patient type acuity indicator profiles to accommodate all specialties for acute, sub-acute, residential and community services

  • Identifies service demand by measuring patient acuity relating to clinical hours required for care for day, evening and night periods, and any selected day, month or year

  • Predicts nursing and midwifery hours required for care on day, evening and night periods

  • Compares demand, measured by acuity, to minimum staffing levels, pre-set nurse patient ratios and HPPD targets

  • Distributes fair and equitable workloads when allocating patients to clinical staff

  • Measures bed utilisation for each shift, highlighting levels of churn

  • Identifies acuity & efficiency trends per shift, day, month and year

  • Identifies peaks and troughs in patient acuity across days of the week and periods of each day

  • Provides ward acuity profiles in hours required, for re-engineering rosters and re-defining nurse patient ratios and HPPD targets

  • Produces efficiency reports which compare actual HPPD measures to pre-set targets

  • Enables the development of acuity based budgets

  • Measures labour costs for specific episodes of care and per DRG

  • Tracks variances in patient outcomes and their impact on nursing/midwifery hours required for care

  • Enables benchmarking of HPPD per patient type within organisations, nationally and internationally

  • Measures CLUs (Care Left Undone)

Reports Generated

In excess of 200 standard reports / graphs are produced to manage nursing and midwifery workloads and to measure the efficiency of nursing and midwifery services. These include;

  • Work management reports

  • Efficiency reports and graphs

  • Bed Management reports and graphs

  • Acuity profile reports

  • DRG specific nursing intensity reports

  • Demand Projection and capacity planning graphs

All TrendCare reports and graphs can be saved as PDF, text or CSV format e.g. for transfer into a spreadsheet.

Ensuring Reliability of Data

Data reliability is maintained and evaluated through:

  • Comprehensive training

  • Regular inter-rater reliability testing

  • Regular data integrity checks

  • Review of patient outcomes

  • Benchmarking studies

Ongoing validity and relevance of the TrendCare system is maintained through;

  • Ongoing research and development

  • Timing studies to validate and/or enhance the acuity measurement tool

  • Annual distribution of evidence-based projected benchmark ranges for all patient types

  • Review of user satisfaction

  • Regular software upgrades