How long is a piece of string? Investigating the amount of time needed to complete various admin tasks as Speech and Language Therapists. 


There is currently no guidance or ballpark figures from RCSLT, ASHA or the HCPC on the  estimated time needed to complete admin tasks as a clinician. Of course there will always be huge variation between clinicians, due to complexity of the case, experience and confidence of the clinician as well as other contextual factors. However, it is in my opinion, that having an average can be useful in terms of planning or justifying the funding/time needed per client (especially when recommending what provision a client needs and you need to factor in the indirect time also).


So, we took it upon ourselves to ask via Twitter and Facebook if any clinicians would respond and share (anonymously) the length of time it takes to complete different admin tasks. We had a whopping 136 responses from across the world who kindly responded. The following will summarise these results along with A Pinch of SaLTs hot-takes on what this means. 


At APOS we feel it is important to clarify however, that this has not been created for the purpose of dictating arbitrary times for clinicians: we would hope that this data would not be used to justify creating unachievable time goals for clinicians e.g completing assessment reports in 30 minutes for all clients. Nor is the purpose of this to be used to shame clinicians for taking ‘too long’ or being ‘hasty’ in the completion of admin tasks. We hope that clinicians will be interested in the data and trends, but appreciate that every clinician is different as well as potential systemic factors that will unfairly disadvantage clinicians, such as limited access to assistive technology to support clinicians, limited funding and monetary resources in the immediate environment.

Results 


The following graph shows the distribution of clinicians across the globe that responded. The majority of the respondents were from the UK, followed by the US. 







The next question we asked was how long respondents had practised, this was so we could see if there was a trend between amount of time practised and amount of time to complete admin tasks (more about that later). This is shown in graph 2.


Now to the meaty part, we asked respondents to calculate the average amount of time to complete various admin tasks for their ‘average’ client. The amount of time was provided in arbitrary intervals of: 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, 75 minutes, 90 minutes, 100+ minutes. The admin tasks that were presented were tasks generally related to a school/pediatric clinic related roles. We then analysed this using summary statistics which are found in the table below. 


Due to the majority of respondents being from the UK, we have opted not to compare reports by country of practice but we would like to take the time to thank everyone that took the time to contribute across the globe! 


Admin Task Range (in minutes) Mode (in minutes) Mean (in minutes)
Writing a full assessment report 15-100+ 100+ 76
Progress Report 5-100+ 45 41
Referral to other services 5-90 30 28
Making resources (the average time spent doing this per client?) 5-100+ 30 37
Case Notes (per client) 5-100+ 15 18
Phone call with stakeholder(per phone call) 5-75 15 18
Emailing Stakeholders (per email) 5-75 15 15
CWriting discharge reports 5-100 30 38
Planning (per session) 5-90 10 20
Planning for training (per training session) 5-100 100+ 59
Setting goals (per client) 5-100 20 26
Evaluating goals (per client) 5-100 20 25
Contributing to EHCPs/IEP (if applicable) 5-100 100 49

Trends

Admin tasks that took the longest were:

  1. Writing Assessment Reports (76 minutes). 
  2. Planning for Training (59 minutes) 
  3. Contributing to EHCPs (49 minutes) 
  4. Progress reports (41 minutes)

Admin tasks that were the quickest complete were:

  1. Emailing Stakeholders (15 minutes).
  2. Phone call with stakeholders (18 minutes).
  3. Casenotes (18 minutes).
  4. Planning for sessions (20 minutes).

Range

Most of the ranges spanned the full 5-100 minutes. This illustrates that there is wide variation between clinicians in completing various admin tasks. This is reassuring to see (as a clinician and wherever you fall on the timeline) as it shows that there will be others who follow similar patterns to you. 


The mean, or average time spent, might be a helpful anchor point for you in planning your therapy services. We want to emphasise that this is a small sample size, and should be used as an informal guide. We have emboldened this in the table to make it clearer.


There was no significant difference in the time it took experienced clinicians vs newer clinicians to complete tasks: the range was similar in both groups. Which is a very interesting trend, with many potential and overlapping explanations.


Distribution

In case you are interested in looking at the distribution of the data see the graphs below.


Distribution closest to normal distribution (think bell curve) were the following:


The rest of the graphs were skewed to one side.


Graphs skewed to the right, suggests this task took on average more time to complete (and align with the averages). Graphs skewed to the left, suggest that on average these tasks took less time (this also aligned with the averages in the table).

Further Areas to Investigate


This was a very informal and off-the-cuff questionnaire, with many limitations. As a clinician, I am planning to use this as a brief guide when planning my own admin time when timetabling. I know that different clients may need significantly less or more time, but using this as a benchmark will hopefully support my planning of direct and indirect duties (I will update on how this goes in practice accordingly). 


Several areas have come to mind that would be useful to investigate: whether this is informally or formally (PhD anyone?!). These were the ideas that I had during this process:


  • An investigation into how much time clinicians are actually given to complete these tasks in practice?
  • An investigation into the ratio of direct vs indirect work typically needed for a client, similar to calculations for staffing time available (RCSLT, No Date). 
  • An investigation into the different factors that contribute to the time needed to complete tasks e.g. caseload size, previous training, technology used (e.g. computer notes vs. paper notes). 
  • How clinicians format/organise their notes/reports/goals. For example, do they use a bank of targets, have a standard assessment template that they use? It would be interesting to see what different clinicians do, what works for them and the comparison of this with the evidence base, for example, using report templates in practise (RCSLT & ASLTIP, 2009). 
  • What organisation strategies are employed by clinicians. For example, Tara uses speech to text often and keeps template emails: what are other clinicians doing?


Conclusion


All clinicians are different. We will have our own strengths and areas of need, different resources available to us and different experiences.  Our clients are all unique and will need different amounts of time dedicated to each task. Ballpark figures could be useful when justifying the amount of time needed to complete tasks or when describing provision recommended. We at APOS hope that this blog post has given you food for thought and provoked new questions for you, as it did for us. We would like to thank the participants that took the time to share their experiences. 


What do you think? Do let us know and let us know if there is anything else you’d like us to (very informally) investigate. 





References

RCSLT & ASLTIP. (2009). Sharing Best Practice In The Send Process. Accessed 20/08/2020 From: https://www.asltip.com/wp-content/uploads/SEND-Guidelines.pdf.

RCSLT. (No Date). Calculating hours available to a FTE speech and language therapist. Retrieved 21/08/2020 from: https://www.rcslt.org/-/media/Project/RCSLT/calculating-available-hours.pdf