Task Manager: an innovative approach to improving hospital communication after hours.

AIM: To improve communication between doctors and nurses after hours, by developing a tool to display ward tasks, allowing staff to prioritise their work, without constant interruption from pagers (beepers). SETTING: Middlemore Hospital, a large metropolitan 800-bed hospital in Auckland, New Zealand. METHOD: Introduction of computerised system (Task Manager) to identify, allocate and complete after-hours tasks. RESULTS: In the first 6 months 21,000 tasks have been completed in Task Manager. Paging of junior doctors has decreased by over 30% and there is broad acceptance of the tool by both nursing and medical staff. Task Manager has collected real-time data on the type of after hours tasks (nearly 50% are phlebotomy-related tasks), busy times of the day (1600 hours to 2400 hours) and who is performing most of the tasks. CONCLUSION: Task Manager is a simple yet powerful tool for prioritising routine tasks after hours. It allows staff to quickly create tasks, and communicate effectively with other members of the team. It has reduced the frequency of junior doctors paging so that they can continue their work with fewer interruptions. Whilst it was introduced to improve effective communication after hours, it has become apparent that there are multiple 'tasks' that are ordered in a multitude of ways in our hospital and many could be served by Task Manager.