Healthcare workers need more ‘time to care’

A UK-wide poll of healthcare workers revealed that most NHS staff think they have too little time to help patients and the quality of care that services provide is falling. This reported reduction in the time to care is perhaps inevitable after almost a decade of health funding failing to keep up with increases in demand, and is a cause for concern for all of us – patients, carers or those working in the NHS. Where does this fit in to the wider picture – and can anything be done about it?

It is not just NHS workers who are feeling the pinch – levels of public satisfaction with the NHS are at an all-time low. Interestingly, the two most cited reasons relate to access (difficulties or delays in getting appointments) and, tellingly, to staff shortages. Even against this gloomy backdrop, the collectivised funding model upon which the NHS is founded continues to find significant public support. All of this points towards a painful congruence – NHS staff feel that they do not have enough time to care, and the public is noticing.

Is ‘time to care’ an outdated concept, harking back to an age of long patient stays, a paternalistic bedside manner and unrealistic expectations? Both staff and patient experience suggest not. Although technology plays an increasing role in healthcare diagnostics, treatment and recovery, delivering care remains a deeply human phenomenon and is essentially a relational and personal task. Recognising that frontline healthcare workers need time to care is not a new phenomenon. Influenced by service improvement methodologies, the ‘productive ward’ initiative in the mid-2000s placed an explicit emphasis on using efficiency techniques for the express purpose of releasing nursing staff to have “time to care”. It was acknowledged that productivity was more than metrics around bed occupancy and throughput, for example, and that the driving purpose of service improvement was to time to care. Whilst research indicated a nuanced impact, the principle is long recognised.

If solutions to these problems were easy, they would have been implemented by now. There is no doubt that on one level, it really is a matter of resources – no system can carry a vacancy factor of around 10% for any length of time without there being an evident impact. However, even within an environment of constrained resources, choices are made every day by caregivers and leaders alike about what receives attention and what is allowed to move into the ‘important but not urgent’ category. That is in no way to blame the hard-pressed caregivers, but instead to indicate that even when it really does not feel like it, every individual has a level of agency.

Feeling as though one does not have time to do one’s job is, put simply, unpleasant for all workers but should especially concern us in care environments. The impact on clinical safety and quality is an obvious starting point, but it is also important to recognise the impacts on care workers themselves with regard to emotional labour and the impact on the psychological contract that working in a caring profession, when people feel that they don’t have enough time to care, must have. As eloquently stated by the Vice-President of the Royal College of Physicians in Wales, it is “…very clear that good clinicians, be they nurses, doctors, therapists or pharmacists, need time to train, time to care and time to rest”. Even in challenging times, self-care and compassionate, values driven leadership can make a difference. Caring is everyone’s business.