Handoff In Nursing

Handoff and transitions are an integral component of nurse to nurse communications during a shift. The information gathered within the scope of a handoff is incorporated into the patient’s plan of care for that day, and helps to facilitate multi-level team collaboration which also utilizes this information. Currently there is an estimated, “80 percent of medical errors are due to communication failure during the handoff process”(Robins & Dai, 2015, p. 264). The purpose of this quality improvement project is to increase the education of nursing staff in the critical care setting, to streamline the delivery of handoffs, as well as the implementation of a standardized checklist-based handoff tool that will narrow the gap in communication breaches.
Therefore, handoff is an integral part of professional communication throughout patient care. Some of the most common mistakes in the transition of patient care occur in the fields of communication, information sharing practices, and human factors (Abraham et al., 2012). Patients that are in the intensive care unit are at even more risk of being impacted due to the vulnerability and complexity of care that is required along with the critical nature of their condition (Colvin, Eisen, & Gong, 2016). according to the Joint Commission miscommunication among healthcare providers has lead to an approximate 80 percent of serious medical errors compromising patient safety (Joint Commission Perspectives, 2012). These mistakes, depending on the degree and the condition of a patient, may lead to dreadful consequences for the patients such as “delays in treatment and ordering of tests, incongruence in patient data, and increased patient length of stay (Abraham et al., 2011, p.28). Given these facts, it becomes evident that the need for an intervention is
Healthcare professionals will be informed that the use of this protocol is mandatory and that no other form of handoff or transition report is permitted for a ninety-day period. All healthcare professionals will be required to submit the carbon copy of the handoff tool at the end of each shift. A qualitative analysis will be conducted from the collected copies to aid in identifying information gaps, frequencies of missed and incorrect information, and missed problem diagnoses (Abraham et al. 2012). The handoff documentation will be analyzed and categorized according to type, such as information breakdowns, decision-making breakdowns, and/or expertise differences (Abraham et al.,