Transition And Handoff Reporting

528 Words2 Pages

Patient Safety Part-1
Transition and handoff reporting are vital tools that are used by nurses in healthcare agencies where there is a continued need for improvement. After reviewing Handoff in Inpatient Surgical Teams, that was developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research Quality [AHRQ] as an educational tool to demonstrate the way a transition and handoff report should be given. The handoff that was exhibited was a great example of why a thorough and complete handoff is necessary. AHRQ Patient Safety (2016) displayed a rapport between the recovery nurse and the unit nurse, which was both professional and detail oriented; the receiving nurse made sure all aspects of the transition and handoff were covered before ending the conversation. …show more content…

Varskey, Reller, and Resar (2007) define quality improvement as the desire and drive of an organization to continually improve their procedures, methods, and activities to meet all patient needs (p.736). Although, handoff reporting is something that has already been implemented in many acute care setting, I feel it is a task that is often put on the back burner and not utilized as it was intended. From my experience, when information is missing from the handoff report, many nurses rely on the electronic health records to retrieve information about the previous shift. Although, a majority of this information should be available in the electronic health record and this has helped “improve communications, in some cases they have the opposite effect” (Bailey, 2016, p.1) because of improper documentation and loss of information. I believe that the purpose behind handoff reports was so they could be used much like a “surgical time out”, which allows time for the health team to stop and focus on the patient and their plan of care. Therefore, this video is important to my transition and handoff quality improvement project, because it emphasized proper utilization of a handoff, and showed how it could help a nurse identify aspects of patient care that may have been missed, leading to a better quality of

Open Document