Development and evaluation of play specialist documentation in a New Zealand hospital

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.

To develop a play specialist progress note format and to evaluate its capacity to generate useful information for the MDT.

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.

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.

Play specialists could either adapt the WISE format or adopt a similar process in developing and evaluating documentation suitable for their own work environment.