One of the obstacles to eliminating unwarranted variation in nursing and care staff deployment across the NHS provider sector has been the absence of a single means of recording and reporting deployment.

Conventional units of measurement that have been developed previously, have informed the evidence base for staffing models - such as reporting staff complements using WTEs, skill-mix or patient to staff ratios at a point in time, but it is recognised by Nurse leaders may not reflect varying staff allocation across the day or include the wider multidisciplinary team.

Also, because of the different ways of recording this data, no consistent way of interpreting productivity and efficiency is straightforward nor comparable between organisations.

To provide a single consistent way of recording and reporting deployment of staff working on inpatient wards/units we developed, tested and adopted Care Hours per Patient Day (CHPPD).

• CHPPD is calculated by adding the hours of registered nurses to the hours of healthcare support workers and dividing the total by every 24 hours of in-patient admissions(or approximating 24 patient hours by counts of patients at midnight).
• CHPPD reports split out registered nurses and healthcare support workers to ensure skill mix and care needs are met.

The data being collected for analysis will be published and available through The Model Hospital service.