Cassandra™ How to sample your activity

Many organisations that employ nurses seek to answer questions about the value of nursing by simply looking at numbers of nurses and tasks that are completed in a given time but not how complex these tasks are, what work doesn’t get done or what resources are really needed. Unfortunately this approach has expanded into the specialist nurse workforce. Some employers or management consultancies ask specialist nurses to do time and motion studies or write down in a diary every few minutes what they are doing. This only really tells us what people are doing in a superficial way.

These techniques do not reflect the complexity of the role and should not really be used as they are not likely to give a useful or accurate result. The job plan or service summary will give a much more rounded view of your work but If there is a demand from the organisation to show how your time is spent you can use Cassandra  which samples activity and will produce charts.

Cassandra is based on a very big data set-the work of 12,000 specialist nurses and around 6,000 academic papers. Looking at a very big data set helps us understand that there are patterns to the work of the specialist nurse and Cassandra exploits these patterns to allow a more accurate sample of work to be taken using categories of work that are based on evidence.

© Alison Leary 2013