1
Score what actually happens
Go down the list and set how often and how long for the things your team really does. Skip everything else, it stays at Never. Most teams score ten to fifteen.
2
Say where each one came from
For the ones you scored, pick who it landed on you from. This is the part nobody else measures, and it is what makes the result worth taking to anyone.
3
Read your figures
Totals and charts build themselves as you go, further down this page. Nothing is sent anywhere.Team size and salaries are optional
What this tool is for, and what it is not
This measures work that has drifted onto registered practitioners because there was nobody else to do it. The purpose is to return qualified staff to qualified work, not to replace them. Nothing here suggests that assessment, safeguarding or any other regulated activity should be done by unregistered staff, and no such task appears on the list. Every task starts assigned to a registered practitioner. Only you can move one, task by task, and only you can judge whether the relationship with a particular person makes a task practice rather than errand.
1 · About you
Two questions, so the results can be broken down by role and by team. You are not asked for your name and no individual answer is ever shown to anyone.
2 · Your week
Answer for yourself, for a typical month. Start anywhere in the list.
| TaskLeave anything that does not happen | How oftenSet this first. Nothing counts until you do | How long each timeIncluding the travel | Who should do thisYour view. Starts with the practitioner | Where does it come fromWho it landed on you from, not who you think should have done it | Hrs / monthWorks itself out |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Per practitioner, per month | 0 | ||||
3 · Your team
Optional. Your hours per practitioner are already worked out above. This scales them to the whole team, and puts a cost against them.
Add salaries to see what the time is worth
You do not need these to finish the audit. The defaults are national averages, so the money figures will be roughly right even if you leave them alone. Ask finance or HR for your own grade midpoints if you want them exact.
4 · What it adds up to
Your own figures, scaled to the whole team.
5 · The picture
The same figures, drawn. Everything below updates as you score the tasks.
6 · How you compare
Against an AmiHC audit of 23 adult social care practitioners at a city council, August 2024.
7 · Where the time goes
Your ten biggest tasks, largest first.
8 · The case for change
What the time you have marked as moveable is worth, and what it would take to absorb it.
9 · Where to start
Indicative only. This models your own estimates, not a time-and-motion study. It is a conversation starter with your team, your head of service and your HR business partner, not a business case on its own, and it is not employment, HR or financial advice. Creating or regrading posts involves job evaluation and staff consultation. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
Method, benchmarks and sources
- Where the task list comes from. The 36 tasks are taken from a survey AmiHC designed and ran with 23 adult social care practitioners at a city council in August 2024, covering social workers, senior social workers, occupational therapy, wellbeing assessors, team managers and support workers across mental health, safeguarding, learning disability, front door, review and locality teams. Every task on the list is something a practitioner reported actually doing. Wording has been tidied, and one question that was corrupted in the original survey has been rewritten to its evident meaning.
- The duration bands are coarse. They come from the original survey and there is no band between one hour and two, so a task that genuinely takes ninety minutes has to be rounded one way or the other. People tend to round up, so treat a single task's figure as indicative and the overall total as the useful number.
- How hours are calculated. Each frequency band is converted to occurrences per month (once or twice a month = 1.5, about once a week = 4.33, two to three times a week = 10.8, daily = 21.7, more than once a day = 43.3) and each duration band to hours (a few minutes = 0.083, 15 to 30 minutes = 0.375, 30 minutes to an hour = 0.75, 2 to 3 hours = 2.5, about half a day = 3.75, a day or more = 7.5). Hours per month for a task is one multiplied by the other. Band midpoints are used throughout, so a single task is imprecise while the total is a reasonable estimate.
- The benchmark figures. Of the 23 practitioners surveyed, 17 reported doing at least one of these tasks. Among those 17 the median was 23.6 hours a month, the top quarter reported 111 hours or more, and the highest single response was 405 hours. Those three figures count only tasks where the respondent gave both a frequency and a duration, so they understate rather than overstate. Separately, and on a different basis, the share of all 23 respondents who reported doing each task at all, whether or not they also gave a duration, was highest for joint visits (65%), then blister packs, food parcels and repairs (57% each), and medical appointments (52%). The largest by total hours were medical appointments, joint visits, health-related transport and patient transport.
- Converting hours to posts, and to money. Both use the same denominator, deliberately, so the two figures reconcile and can sit side by side in a paper. One post is taken as the contracted hours you enter, less annual leave, less a further 15% for sickness, training and supervision. On the defaults that is about 1,428 hours a year. Travel is not deducted, because the durations you enter already include it.
- Cost. An hour of practitioner time is costed as the salary you enter multiplied by your on-costs figure, divided by the hours available after annual leave. Enter the salary that matches the contracted hours you entered, not a full-time figure for a part-time team. The value shown is a value-of-time figure, not a cash release, unless a practitioner post is genuinely reduced or a vacancy is left unfilled.
- Where the work comes from, and why that is the important question. Counting how many hours a team spends on this work tells the team something it already knows. Counting where the hours came from tells the sending organisation something it has no other way of finding out, and it is the only part of this audit with somebody else's name on it. It also separates three problems that look identical on a timesheet and need completely different answers. Work transferred from another organisation has a payer. Work generated by your own systems is a process fault, and funding it would entrench it. Work with no service attached to it is a question about who owns a need, and no amount of money moving between existing organisations will settle it.
- What the origin question does not ask. It asks where a task came from, which is something a practitioner can answer from observation. It deliberately does not ask whether the originating organisation should have done it themselves, which depends on that organisation's internal processes and is not something anyone outside it can reliably judge. Establishing that requires the sender's side of the story, through case-note tracing or a joint exercise, and that is a proper study rather than a twenty minute audit. This tool produces the inventory and the volume. It does not produce the verdict.
- Safeguarding flag. Tasks marked MONEY involve handling a person's money, bank access, benefits or bills. They carry financial abuse and governance risk regardless of who does them, and they should sit inside a documented procedure with clear recording and countersigning. That argument for change is independent of capacity.
- What this does not measure. Case work, statutory assessment, safeguarding enquiries, supervision and recording are all out of scope. This is only the work that sits outside the professional role. A team can score low here and still be overloaded.
- What one council did with it. The survey behind this tool led to the creation of six full-time equivalent team support worker posts, funded from within an adult social care restructure, taking this work off registered practitioners rather than adding it to a waiting list.