Emergency department doctor Katie Walker always knew there was more she could do to help her patients, but felt her hands were tied behind her back by the huge amount of clerical work that took up a large part of her day.
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She wondered if there was a relatively simple solution that could also cut waiting times and make hospitals more efficient.
It was this frustration that led her to spearhead an Australian-first study that trialled the role of scribes in a few emergency departments across Victoria.
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.
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.
Data was collected from November 2015 to January 2018 at Cabrini, Dandenong, Austin, Clayton (paediatrics) and Bendigo emergency departments
Results of the trial, which were recently published in BMJ, found doctors were able to treat 25 per cent more patients per shift with the total time patients spent in emergency departments was cut by 19 minutes.
Dr Walker, a doctor at Cabrini Hospital in Melbourne, said the hosptials involved all improved their performance in some way.
Australian National University medical student Will Dunlop was the head scribe in the study, a role he did while completing an undergraduate science degree.
"The learning curb at the beginning was huge, it was like learning a new language," he said.
Mr Dunlop said the benefits of scribes to patients, doctors and the hospital as a whole was evident throughout the trial.
"Seeing appreciation from patients was the best part and interacting with them," Mr Dunlop said.
"The doctors, after they got used to working with a scribe, would say 'this is great, I don't know how I've worked without you'."
Dr Walker said Australian emergency department doctors spend nearly 50 per cent of their time typing up patient notes and other clerical tasks.
She said she often felt like her hands were tied behind her back when treating patients.
"There's a deep distress knowing there are more things I could do to manage patients' symptoms but not being able to because I am filling out forms," she said.
She said the introduction of electronic health records had significantly added to the clerical burden, taking doctors away from their patients.
Dr Walker said the scribe program, with support from governments and health departments, could immediately be rolled out across the country and was cost efficient.
"It's mind numbing how much productivity we've lost because of all the different electronic systems," she said.
