28 May HBHC PHN Workload Project Opportunity

Natasha Pennant,  a graduate nursing student at the University of Toronto, is currently working on a project on behalf of PHNs in Healthy Babies Healthy Children’s (HBHC) program in a large urban HU.

HBHC is a prevention and early intervention home visiting program. The primary goal of the HBHC program is to promote optimal child health and development by providing families support through home visits from public health nurses (PHNs) and lay family home visitors.

The PHNs in the HBHC program employ a variety of interventions such as service coordination, case management, health education, supportive counselling and early child screening.

Like many community health nurses, PHNs are experiencing caseload/workload challenges related to the increased complexity of clients and the other social determinants of health.  Research indicates that the implementation of effective and efficient mechanisms that address nursing workload issues can lead to improvements in client, nurse, and organisational outcomes.

The primary objective of the HBHC PHN workload project is to identify and examine workload measurement and caseload management systems and tools for use by PHNs.

In order to examine evidence that inform workload and caseload decision making practices for both front line workers and managers a literature review and environmental scan are being conducted. Natasha is seeking assistance with the environmental scan.

The main purpose of the environmental scan is to obtain information about (and if possible samples) of current and past workload measurement and caseload management tools/systems (e.g. client caseload classification ‘weighting’ tool).  used by organisations providing home visiting services to families with young children.

Responses by June 18 2012 would greatly be appreciated.  Please respond directly to Natasha at npennan@toronto.ca