The role of physical design and informal communication

Table 2 Frequency of tasks for each week of data collection
Frequency (%) per Week
Task 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Patient 14.1% 10.1% 14.0% 10.6% 20.1% 16.0% 17.2% 13.4%
Patient Interactive 4.2% 17.6% 11.0% 5.6% 13.4% 13.2% 11.2% 18.3%
Non-Interactive 27.5% 31.8% 29.9% 33.1% 30.2% 32.0% 28.4% 24.6%
Social 16.2% 13.5% 12.8% 16.2% 9.4% 9.1% 10.4% 7.7%
Administrative 3.5% 0.7% 0.6% 1.4% 3.4% 4.6% 3.0% 0.7%
Being Taught 3.5% 1.2% 1.4% 1.5%
Seeking Assistance 7.0% 2.0% 3.7% 1.4% 3.4% 3.7% 3.0% 2.8%
Seeking Advice 2.8% 5.4% 4.3% 5.6% 1.3% 1.8% 3.0% 2.1%
Discussing Patient Care 11.3% 10.8% 11.6% 12.7% 10.1% 10.0% 14.9% 25.4%
Providing Assistance 2.1% 3.4% 6.1% 6.3% 2.0% 0.5% 3.7% 0.7%
Providing Advice 7.7% 4.7% 4.3% 4.2% 4.0% 5.9% 2.2% 3.5%
Validation 0.7% 0.7% 1.4%
Other 0.6% 0.7% 2.0% 1.8% 1.5% 0.7%
Total (%) 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0%
Frequency
30.0%
25.0%
20.0%
15.0%
10.0%
5.0%
0.0%
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Week
Social
Discussing Patient
Care
Patient Interactive
Figure 21 Frequency of communication tasks that show a pattern of change over
time
b) Time
The percentage of total time (over 25 hours of data collection) spent on each
task shows a very similar, though not identical, distribution as the frequency analysis.
The highest percentage of time was spent in non-interactive tasks (25.9%) followed by
“Patient” (24.6%), “In Transit” (12.1%), “Discussing Patient Care” (7.8%), and
“Social” (6.5%) (See Table 3). Analysis by average time of a single interaction (Table
71