Paper Sample on Northwestern Memorial Hospital: Improving Handoff Communication for Better Patient Care

Introduction

Northwestern Memorial Hospital believes in creating positive patient interaction in their quest for better health care. Improving handoff communication is crucial in enhancing the safety of patients. Poor bedside reporting always compromises the safety of patients and leads to dissatisfaction of both health workers and patients. Effective handoff communication is essential to Northwest Memorial Hospital since it does not have effective handoff communication processes among the staff members. Standardizing handoff communication would improve teamwork, increase staff and patient satisfaction, and improve patient safety. The Harvard Medical Institutions researched communication failures of medical facilities in the United States. They discovered that about thirty percent of miscommunications had claimed 1744 lives and 1.7 billion dollars within five years (Collins, 2017). Improving communication during handoff reporting could reduce these numbers.

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Miscommunications in bedside reporting had caused unimaginable errors in the delivery of health care since most nurses fail to offer adequate information in handoff reports. The nurse preceptors and charge nurses will work with graduate nurses, student nurses, and newly employed nurses to ensure that they adhere to the freshly implemented standardized handoff communication. Northwestern Memorial Hospital will accomplish its mission of improving the communities' health since it will ensure that the safety of patients comes first. Northwestern Memorial Hospital will provide the best health care since the strategy will improve teamwork among healthcare staff, enhance family and patient satisfaction, and the patients will understand their health conditions and treatment.

Literature Review: Topic/Issue

Taylor evaluated the standardized strategy to handoff communication and investigated whether the approach could improve the satisfaction and safety of patients (Taylor, 2015). The researchers organized qualitative-survey based research and used qualitative evidence from the survey to indicate the barriers to effective handoff procedures (Taylor, 2015). The researchers conducted face-to-face interviews with all hospital staff, and the scholars discovered that the obstacles to the implementation of standardized handoff bedside reporting included. The barriers included challenges of conducting walking rounds due to distractions such as privacy concerns, compliance barriers, call bells, and phone calls (Taylor, 2015). Patients claimed that a standardized handoff system, including nurses introducing themselves, would improve the patient-nurse relationship (Taylor, 2015). The researchers decided to consider the potential barriers when implementing standardized handoff reporting and the strategies to resolve the barriers.

The article relates to the issue since it aims at improving bedside reporting to reduce the errors and information gaps that may harm the patient. Taylor realizes that if handoff reports lack critical standardized information, they may lead to critical errors since handoff reports are a crucial way of communication among nurses (Taylor, 2015). The article sought to maximize effective communication and improve the quality of safety and patient care by standardizing the handoff communication and reports. Therefore, the article is relevant to the issue of poor bedside reporting and communication. It explains the research of bedside reporting and seeks an intervention that could improve bedside reporting and communication.

The researchers aimed to investigate factors that contributed to the safety of patients or hindered their safety by understanding the processes of information during the intra-shift period (Birmingham et al., 2015). The scholars used constructive grounded theory to conduct the qualitative study (Birmingham et al., 2015). The researcher collected data in two ways; ethnographic observation of handouts and semi-structured interviews (Birmingham et al., 2015). They discovered that the main barriers to effective bedside handoff communication were inefficient data transferring procedures that negatively affected nurses who began their shifts and environmental distractions (Birmingham et al., 2015). The authors conclude that it is necessary to maintain continuous communication between nurses and managers to detect problems in the environment and prevent disruptions (Birmingham et al., 2015). Another challenge was the time allocated for the handoffs. The hospital allocated thirty minutes for the daytime handoff shifts, but it did not allocate handoff time for the midnight shift.

This article relates to poor handoff communication and handoff reporting since it investigates factors that hinder or support patients' safety and discloses that the effectiveness of the bedside handoff communication is the main factor. Ineffective or poor bedside handoff communication would put the sick at risk, while effective communication would promote the safety of the sick. Getting full information about patients from the outgoing nurse is effective in improving the safety of the patients. The article revealed that communication during the intra-shift period was crucial in maintaining the patients' records.

Standardization of handoff procedures can enhance patient safety and increase the handoff procedure (Birmingham et al., 2015). The investigators grasped the full story of handoff procedure by getting information from the practice nursing environment where the incoming and off going nursing staffs interacted to give comprehensive patient information including the care plan, follow-up information, interventions, critical details, current status and history (Birmingham et al., 2015). The processes painted a clear picture, but the problem arose when some patients were admitted towards the end of some nurses' shifts, leading to inadequate bedside reporting.

Literature Review: Solution/Intervention

Streeter & Harrington evaluated the view of effective communication strategies by the nursing personnel representative that could enhance patient safety and increase the efficiency of the handoff procedure (Streeter & Harrington, 2017). The researchers used a qualitative-based study on cross-sectional surveys and evaluated four different groups of nurses (Streeter & Harrington, 2017). The groups were based on incoming/outgoing and best/worst group, and the selection of nurses to all the groups was random. The researchers concluded that using the evidence-based tool for patient handoff could enhance patient safety and improve the efficiency of intra-shift data transferring (Streeter & Harrington, 2017). Moreover, nurses could understand the competencies and skills required to enhance the effectiveness of patient handoff.

This study relates to the proposed solution since it proves that enhancing handoff communication would reduce errors related to communication in care. The research offers a solution to the problem of miscommunication and poor bedside reporting during a change of shifts by improving handoffs offering core communication competencies such as socio-emotional communication that proves concerned, warmth, and trust, giving, seeking, and verifying information.

Grove et al. (2016), investigated whether safety priming during handoff communications could lead to positive changes in enhancing safety behaviors in nurses (Grove et al., 2016). The researchers performed a mixed-method pilot study on twenty charge nurses and asked them to provide their demographic data. The RNs created two groups, which were the assignment intervention and the control groups. All participants in the intervention group got a safety priming intervention while the control group did not get the safety priming intervention (Grove et al., 2016). Nurses who received the priming intervention articulated a slightly higher awareness of the importance of safety-enhancing behaviors (Grove et al., 2016). But in this case, there is no statistical difference.

The article offers the problem of poor communication during handoff communication by implementing the safety priming intervention to allow nurses to understand the importance of emphasizing patient safety through proper handoffs and communication procedures (Grove et al., 2016). Safety priming help achieve patient safety goals by conceptualizing it to communicate safety values.

Implementation/Intervention

The final project will implement standardized handoff communication at the bedside by employing standardized bedside reports. Northwestern Memorial Hospital should implement priming interventions, walking around by nurses and charge nurses, provide flexible written handoff reports which have softcopy backups, core communication competencies, minimize concomitant meetings, and provide dedicated handoff time between incoming and outgoing nurses (Taylor, 2015). The standardized handoff reports should address psychological and systematic concerns, laboratory results, vital signs, advance directives, dietary directives, activity levels, diagnosis, and drug allergies.

The first step to implementing the standardized plan involves educating the medical staff to show them the standardized handoff report components. After that, the hospital should introduce a trial period and encourage the charge nurses to supervise other nurses during the trial period (Taylor, 2015). The final step involves the full implementation of the project, and it becomes the norm of the medical facility.

The project will address the problem of poor bedside reporting by enhancing communication between nurses during a change of shifts, thus improving the safety of patients. The charge nurses will determine the success of the plan by determining the patients' and staff satisfaction of the standardized handoff reporting and communication through face-to-face interviews with patients and nurses and electronic medical data records. The evaluation will also be useful in identifying areas of the project that need improvements or changes.

References

Birmingham, P., Buffum, M. D., Blegen, M. A., & Lyndon, A. (2015). Handoffs and Patient Safety. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 37(11), 1458–1478. https://doi.org/10.1177/0193945914539052

Collins-Thursday, R. (2017). Hand-off communication: The weak link in healthcare. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hospital-management-administration/hand-off-communication-the-weak-link-in-healthcare.html

Groves, P. S., Bunch, J. L., Cram, E., Farag, A., Manges, K., Perkhounkova, Y., & Scott-Cawiezell, J. (2017). Priming Patient Safety Through Nursing Handoff Communication: A Simulation Pilot Study. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 39(11), 1394–1411. https://doi.org/10.1177/0193945916673358

Streeter, A. R., Harrington, N. G., & Lane, D. R. (2015). Communication Behaviors Associated with the Competent Nursing Handoff. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 43(3), 294–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2015.1052828

Taylor, J. S. (2015). Improving Patient Safety and Satisfaction With Standardized Bedside Handoff and Walking Rounds. Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing, 19(4), 414–416. https://doi.org/10.1188/15.CJON.414-416