Why you should read this article:

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To appreciate the complexity of measuring and quantifying health visitor workload

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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

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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.