Health visitor workload: an integrative review of the literature

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.