• To appreciate the complexity of measuring and quantifying health visitor workload
• To recognise the need for health visitor workload planning and development to make the best use of staffing resources and to promote quality preschool child and family outcomes
• To be aware of the lack of consensus on how best to organise and measure health visitor workload
Managing health visitor workload is essential to ensure a safe and sustainable service. This article discusses the findings of an integrative review that aimed to summarise the literature on health visitor workload and to ascertain how such literature might inform future workload planning and development. A total of 23 studies were included in the review from which four main themes emerged: organising services; measuring workload; supporting workload; and practice issues affecting workload. No consensus emerged on how best to organise and measure health visitor workload. Locality-based workload tools had minimal programmatic research directed towards establishing their reliability and validity. These tools merit closer examination to determine how they might inform future health visitor workload planning and development.
Primary Health Care. doi: 10.7748/phc.2023.e1804
Peer reviewThis article has been subject to external double-blind peer review and checked for plagiarism using automated software
Correspondence Conflict of interestNone declared
Reid B, Tracey J (2023) Health visitor workload: an integrative review of the literature. Primary Health Care. doi: 10.7748/phc.2023.e1804
Published online: 02 August 2023
or
Alternatively, you can purchase access to this article for the next seven days. Buy now
Are you a student? Our student subscription has content especially for you.
Find out more
