Multitasking during Medication Management in a Nursing Home: A Time Motion Study

Multitasking, defined as performing two or more interventions simultaneously, increases the cognitive burden of clinicians. This may, in turn, lead to higher risk of medication and procedural errors. Time motion study (TMS) data for nurses in nursing homes revealed an extensive amount of multitasking while managing medications. Further investigation of multitasked nursing interventions will provide a foundation for optimizing medication management workflows.

Using a continuous observational TMS method, this study aimed to describe pairs of multitasked nursing interventions associated with medication management interventions, including preparing and administering medications, assessing medication effects, instructing on medications, and documenting medication administration.

An external nurse observer used 57 predefined Omaha System nursing interventions embedded within TimeCaT (version 3.9), TMS data recording software to collect observation data in a single nursing home. A total of 120 hours of time-stamped observation data from nine nurses were downloaded from TimeCaT and analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics.

The majority (74%) of medication management interventions were multitasked, resulting in 2,003 pairs of multitasked interventions. Of the 57 Omaha System nursing interventions, 35 were involved in these multitasking pairs. When nurses multitasked, the average duration of medication preparation was longer (non-multitasked: 81 seconds; multitasked: 162 seconds, p < 0.05), while the average duration of medication administration record documentation was shorter (non-multitasked: 93 seconds; multitasked: 66 seconds, p < 0.05).

The findings reveal the complexity of medication management in nursing homes with numerous and diverse multitasking pairs. Findings provide a platform for in-depth study of medication management multitasking in the clinical context, and inform future efforts to create clinical and informatics solutions to optimize medication management workflow. This method may be also applied to examine medication management and multitasking in other clinical settings.