Cultural Change

Nursing Station Shift Report to Bedside Nurse Shift Report for Patients and Staff

Introduction

The transference of care and responsibility of a patient from one nurse to the other is called is a time called change of shift report. The exchange of ideas that results after this change is connected to sustainability of patient's care and safety. It is uncommon that nurses realize the importance of conveying report to the patient's bedside and practice this process.

There are a number of places where this change shift report can be communicated, such as nurse's stations, face to face, recordings and conference room. There is a chance of misinformation while giving away the report from the patient's beside. For this reason, patients, along with the staff are included when the report is communicated. This helps in decreasing the discrepancies in patient's care and treatment (Caruso, 2007).

Background

It has been observed that gap of communication drives in when the responsibility shifts. This change of shift report addresses all those discrepancies that contribute towards the patient's care. From a medical point of view, this change is very important as one nurse ends her shift and the other is taking over the charge from her. This is a very heavy responsibility which calls for error free report otherwise it can put a patient at risk.

Evidence

It was reported that only 13% of change shift reports incorporated care setting up and 3% integrated assessment of nursing care. These problems often left nurses with unsatisfactory information to present patients with the best care and restricted patients' effort into their own plan of action (Jordan, 1991).

It has also been observed that the change shift report serves other purposes, such as educational, organizational and emotional purposes. However, the report is a multifaceted process which covers a lot of information and skills. The change shift report is very important but one does not find much research work done on this. More than ten years has passed since the no research work on the evaluation of the report has been conducted in the United States.

The reason behind the unavailability on the evaluation of the report is the complexities of the handoffs. Secondly, because of the electronic health reports, technology has penetrated in the nursing patterns and affected the change shift reports.

Goals

Implementation of the consistent approach to the communication of handoff is the main goal of change shift report. The goal is developed to improve the effectiveness of patient's care from one to another.

The exchange of adequate amount of information is very important for promoting patient's safety. It is often seen, that nurses pass on the repetitive and irrelevant information leaving behind the important one. This is one of the communication failures identified during the study.

Involvement of patients in the change shift report is also very important. The reason behind this is the patients are very much aware about their rights of treatment and safety. Moreover, they have knowledge about their diseases because of the sources of internet, television ...