“Traditionally, a doctor’s role has been focused on patient care but since the introduction of electronic health records, we have become increasingly overloaded with documentation and clerical responsibilities that take us away from our primary duty of care for our patients,” A/Prof Walker said. Results from the trial, led by Cabrini’s Alan, Ada and Eva Selwyn Emergency Department (ED) doctor Associate Professor Katie Walker, found that scribes increased the efficiency of emergency departments and decreased doctors’ administrative workload. The research looked at data from 589 scribed shifts (5098 patients) and 3296 non-scribed shifts (23,838 patients), and compared how productive they were. Scribes are used in hospitals throughout America and have been trialled in other countries internationally but are not operational in Australia.Ĭurrently, Australian emergency department doctors spend nearly 50 per cent of their time typing up patient notes and undertaking other clerical tasks, taking their focus away from core medical tasks like seeing patients, working out what is wrong with them and communicating this to patients and their health team. Scribes were present during the time when a patient consults with a doctor and assisted in writing up patient notes, in close consultation with the treating doctor. In the first trial of its kind in Australia, locally-trained scribes were used in five hospital emergency departments across the state of Victoria, Australia – Cabrini Malvern, Dandenong Hospital, Austin Hospital, Bendigo Hospital and Monash Children’s Hospital. Scribes are trained to complete clerical data entry associated with a patient’s visit to the emergency department, allowing doctors to concentrate on core medical tasks instead. A new role in the health system could improve efficiency in emergency departments and decrease the time patients spend in emergency departments, following a successful trial in hospitals throughout Victoria recently published in The BMJ.
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