Marloes de Ruiter is Zorgmanager at Stichting Havenzicht in Rotterdam and a Viewde customer. We asked her to write this and did not edit the argument.
On a typical night in our largest location, the staff on duty speak Dutch, Polish, Romanian, Tigrinya and Turkish between them. The client record is in Dutch, and must be. Regulators read Dutch, courts read Dutch, and the next colleague reads Dutch.
For years the compromise was that carers wrote in imperfect Dutch, or wrote very little. Both are documentation failures, and the second is more common than anyone admits.
What changed
Prompts, menus and structured fields appear in the carer's own language. Free text can be dictated in that language, is stored in the record in Dutch, and keeps the original alongside it. Nothing is lost and nothing is guessed at.
The objections we had
Translation errors. Real, and the reason the original is retained. A senior can check the source when an entry matters clinically. In fourteen months we have had four entries queried and two corrected.
Staff will stop learning Dutch. This was the strongest internal objection. It has not happened, and our language course attendance is up, which I attribute to people no longer feeling humiliated by their own documentation.
Regulators will object. The IGJ inspector we asked was interested rather than concerned, because the record they read is complete and in Dutch.
The measurable part
- Average narrative entry length on night shifts went from 9 words to 34.
- Shifts ending with no narrative entry at all fell from 22% to 4%.
- Two incidents in the last year were identified from night entries that, on our previous pattern, would probably not have been written down.
We did not have a documentation problem. We had a language problem that produced a documentation problem.
If your workforce looks like ours, ask any vendor how many languages the interface runs in, and whether the original text is retained. The second question matters more than the first.