Background Play specialists work closely with doctors and nurses to improve outcomes and the hospital experience for young patients. Documentation is an important but challenging aspect of their work. It should be incorporated into their workflow through a user-friendly format to minimise workload and record information that is useful to the multidisciplinary team (MDT) at the same time.
Aim To develop a play specialist progress note format and to evaluate its capacity to generate useful information for the MDT.
Method A questionnaire and inductive coding were used to develop a format incorporating the advantages of a structure focused on capturing useful information and the narrative style of documentation. The format, Well-being, Interests, Strategies, Evaluation (WISE), was aligned with play specialists’ workflow and allowed for documentation of play in children’s hospital care. Post-implementation evaluation comprised a usefulness survey and qualitative analyses of documentation.
Results Perception of the usefulness of the WISE format was positive with nurses giving higher ratings than doctors. Gaps were identified for further investigation and improvement.
Conclusion Play specialists could either adapt the WISE format or adopt a similar process in developing and evaluating documentation suitable for their own work environment.
Nursing Children and Young People. doi: 10.7748/ncyp.2019.e1144
Peer reviewThis article has been subject to open peer review and has been checked for plagiarism using automated software
Correspondence Conflict of interestNone declared
Goh G, Edmonds L, Christos J (2019) Development and evaluation of play specialist documentation in a New Zealand hospital. Nursing Children and Young People. doi: 10.7748/ncyp.2019.e1144
AcknowledgementsThe authors wish to acknowledge Scott Lee for his invaluable time, contribution and advice on investigation procedures, quantitative and qualitative methodologies, statistical analyses and publication in peer-reviewed journals. The authors also express their appreciation to the multidisciplinary team of the participating hospital for their involvement in the surveys and helpful feedback
Published online: 11 February 2019
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