Download Information Hand-Off Improves Patient Care

Information Hand-Off Improves Patient Care
The exchange of the baton is crucial in relays.
It’s the moment when one person completes a leg of the race and passes the baton to the
next. Runners must perfect the hand-off to be successful. If it’s not done properly, a team
can lose time, track position or be disqualified.
This same precision is required in hospitals when physicians, nurses and other providers
share critical information about their patients.
National Recognition
Most hospitals have implemented hand-off communication tools, including SBARs,
which stands for Situation, Background, Assessment and Recommendation, to share
critical patient information. But the team at Trinity Regional Health System in Rock
Island, Ill., took a literal approach to the process: They started using yellow batons to
hold their SBAR forms when the clinical staff shared patient information.
Their technique has received national recognition and was a featured best practice in the
Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations “Improving Hand-Off
Communication” publication. It also was featured in the OR Connections article,
“Applying Evidence-Based Information to Improve Hand-Off Communication in
Perioperative Services.”
Standardized Communication
“In the past, we heard there wasn’t always great communication between nurses when
handing off care to the next provider,” Bobette Shay, Trinity’s Director of Surgical
Services, says. “This hospital-wide initiative has helped us improve care by having an
easily recognizable visual element when passing the critical information between
caregivers.”
Trinity formed a multidisciplinary committee to evaluate hand-off communication. They
identified information that nurses and other clinical staff were already sharing and
organized it into the SBAR categories. The one-page forms fit into the batons, and staff
made sure they were handed-off when patients transferred to a different area of the
hospital.
“The same information on the form also is available in the patient’s chart, but it saves
time and makes it easier to find important details, such as allergies, chronic illness or any
medications already administered,” Shay says.
The hospital recently launched an electronic SBAR system in several patient areas. The
medical teams also switched to bright yellow folders – the batons were sometimes
difficult to handle – and the process continues to have a positive impact by helping
providers ensure vital patient information is received and understood by all members of
the medical team.
As a result of this initiative, physicians have reported an increase in satisfaction with
communication from nurses. Staff also have noted increased satisfaction with
communication between patient areas and other health-care professionals.
For more information, visit www.ihs.org/InnovationSBAR or contact Bobette Shay,
Trinity’s Director of Surgical Services, at [email protected] or
(309) 779-2194.