Why use Job planning?
Using a detailed job plan is one of the quickest and easiest ways to show how you spend your time. It can help show what you do all day and also help show where there would be deficit in a service if you were to stop working in that role. Although it’s probably the easiest method of showing how you spend your time it still requires a bit of effort – about 30-60 minutes to pull together plus a bit of thinking time! But then nothing worth having is easy!
A job plan that is quite sparse only showing where a practitioner is, for example “Monday AM clinic” or “Tue PM Admin”, oversimplifies the complex work of the specialist. Anything that oversimplifies your work should be avoided!
Most specialist nurses will have five parts at least to their day. For example they might start the day by doing telephone response work (for example picking up messages and dealing with issues such as symptom control or the management of care). This might be followed by an activity such as a clinic, an MDT meeting or an inpatient review. During each of these activities it’s likely that a number of interventions will take place. It’s important to show a few of the common interventions during these activities. It’s also important to show where the focus of any non-clinical administration is – for example – typing up letters after clinics, arranging routine appointments after a multidisciplinary meeting etc. This will help show where you are less productive – work a lower band worker could be doing or where you could be doing more productive clinical work.
This template will allow you to show where you are and what you are doing using the language of the profession. It will also allow you to reflect the complexity of things you do for example by showing the different interventions you might perform.
How to use this job planning template
Think about how you spend your week-where you go and what you do.
First choose where you work and place them at different times of the week. Then choose the things you do there most of the time. It doesn’t have to be exhaustive – just a few interventions to give an example.
The interventions here are the common ones used by specialist nurses everyday-you might not be familiar with some of the terms so simply roll your cursor over them for an explanation.
An example might be Monday AM Telephone/Email response work (i.e. listening to your messages and dealing with them) then you might choose some common interventions that you would do over the phone in this situation for example “meeting information needs” and “Rescue work”. After checking your messages and dealing with any urgent issues you might have a clinic. Just drag and drop the “Outpatient” label down and then some common interventions for example “continence assessment” “Shared decision making”
Include things in the main job plan that you do AT LEAST once a week. At the bottom of the template is a box which says “ad hoc”, put in here any occasional things, or things that happen often but unplanned i.e. urgent reviews.
Go through all the days you work and keep filling it in. You can find an example job plan here