title: Health advisor workload.
abstract: Health advisors (HAs) are an integral part of the multidisciplinary team within genitourinary (GU) medicine clinics, with a pivotal role in the National Sexual Health Strategy by enhancing liaison between community sexual health provision and GU medicine services. Greater clarity is needed about HAs' current activities and workload in order to enable benchmarking and ensure accurate workforce planning. We describe a tool for assessing HA workload and activity and evaluating its use in real clinic environments through a prospective time and motion model. Ten centres (63% of those invited to participate) within a single region did so. Median HA working times were calculated at almost 15 min/patient consultation and approximately 10 min/telephone call. Although there were strong positive correlations between HA availability and some markers of clinical activity, these were weaker than similar correlations applied to medical staff, raising the possibility of suboptimal HA workforce planning.
authors.affiliation: Department of Genitourinary Medicine, Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Trust, King's Mill Hospital, Mansfield Road, Sutton in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire NG17 4JL, UK. david.kellock@sfh-tr.nhs.uk
authors.forename: D J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Kellock
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bingwa
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Carlton
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Carlin
mesh_terms: D003695:Delivery of Health Care; D006302:Health Services Research / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D017146:Models, Organizational; D000078329:Workforce; D016526:Workload