Vacation and staff shortage collection priorities

Staff Shortage

When we are short of collection staff (e.g. vacation coverage, empty EFT's) consider the following guidelines to prioritize your work:

1. Ideally at the beginning of the day, but at least once per shift, check your email and the recent changes on the wiki, to keep on top of collection/coding guidelines
2. The very first data collection priority (regardless of personnel limitations) will be to collect the "Minimal Data Set" on all patients.
3. Complete any data requested specially by Julie/Pagasa, e.g. needed for quarterly reports
4. Complete oldest discharge charts for patients discharged, starting with oldest first
5. gather the entire data set on the remaining patients

Staff Reassignment to high priority areas

Occasionally staff will have some of their shifts assigned to the area were there is the highest project priority during vacation time or when we have unfilled positions.

Vacation Coverage

• Staff have the option to pick up posted vacation shifts
• as outlined above the MDS should be done on all laptops, this requires laptops to remain in the office during vacation time
• Finishing some patients rather than keeping up with all will allow for more patient’s data to be sent and will leave fewer patients on the laptop to be followed up later.

Context

In response to the reduction in data collection personnel availability in the wake of the H1N1 pandemic, the Task Team was charged with the task of delineating a reduced data collection schema. We went into it assuming that we’d identify a subset of the entire dataset that would be collected on all patients during the personnel shortage, with the idea that the rest of the data items would be filled in after the shortage was ended. However, we realized that the workflow of data collectors demands a different approach to personnel limitations. This is because it is much quicker to gather the data once a patient has left the unit (or is very close to leaving), and data collection of any subset of data results in a need to duplicate effort subsequently to gather the remaining data elements. In times of personnel shortage, this means that we’ll fall increasingly further behind in completing data collection, but by maintaining the minimal data set on all admitted patients we will know which charts need to be pulled to catch up after the personnel shortage ends.

(as per p:Dr. Allan Garland)Ttenbergen 09:23, 3 July 2009 (CDT)