PICO Clinical Questions

PICO Clinical Question: Does change of shift nursing reports at the bedside with patient participation improve the safety and quality of their care than those reports done at the nurse’s station without their involvement?

Parts of the PICO question:
P: Patients that participate in the change of shift nursing report.
I: Change of shift nursing reports at the bedside.
C: Patients that are not involved with change of shift reports.
O: Improvement of the safety and quality of patient care.

What is the importance of the PICO question? The PICO question provides a framework for health care practitioners to focus on when researching the literature for supporting evidence to clinical questions or issues (LoBiondo-Wood & Haber, 2014). The break down of the question into individual parts helps to structure a search of relevant research that will help to answer your clinical question. It helps also to define and compare the populations affected by researching the evidence and evaluating the outcomes of this research.
Evidence has been found that moving shift reports from the nurse’s station to the patient’s bedside has improved safety and given patients a better grasp of their condition and treatment plan (Ofori-Atta, 2015). The importance of this PICO question helps lead and point the researcher in the direction that provides evidence-based research to help answer the clinical question. Over three hundred journals and peer-reviewed articles appear after searching one database with the keywords, bedside shift reports. Many of the articles provide evidence that implementation of this process not only improves patient safety and quality of care, but also shown an increase in patient engagement, enhance caregiver support, and education (Gregory, Tan, & Tilrico,