Bedside Shift Report In Nursing Care

Nursing shift reports is how bedside nurses working in a Med-Surg unit begin and end their shift of work. It is how we assume the responsibility of our patients in order to follow the continuity of care already established. There is not really a right or wrong way to do it since each specific report is unique depending on the case and the circumstances going on at that specific time. However, the real question is not how to do it, but rather where to do it. During my years of practice as a bedside nurse, I have done shift reports at the nurse station, over the phone (as a tape recording), and at the bedside in patient’s room. The tape recording reports saved us time but a lot of information was being omitted, jeopardizing the safety and quality

According to Maxson, Derby, Wrobleski and Foss (2012) the purpose of their study was to determine if bedside shift reports increases patients satisfaction as well as staff satisfaction with communication and accountability. During this study, they used a convenience sample of sixty patients, 30 before the practice of bedside handover report, and another 30 after implementing the practice. After getting the approval of the Institutional Review Board, information was collected using specific surveys given to nurses and patients. One question from the patient’s surveys was whether or not they were informed about their plan of care. Staff nurses were surveyed using an investigator-developed survey before and after implementation of bedside reports in which the questions from the survey were used to measure changes in accountability, prioritization of workload, and performance of medication reconciliation (Maxson et al., 2012). Some of the limitations of this study according to Maxson et al. (2012) included the use of a convenience sample of patients in one surgical unit and using an eleven bed unit

According to Wakefield, Ragan, Brandt, and Tregnago (2012) patient perceptions of the bedside report process were subsequently collected through the use of structured interviews, and nurses information such as perceptions, processes, and issues were collected during pre and post implementation of bedside shift reports. They were some limitations on this study such as data reported coming only from one nursing unit and not all data could represent all patients cared for on the study unit. The final results of the study showed significant increase in six nurse-specific patients’ satisfaction scores, and concluded with the decision to adopt bedside shift report in all inpatient nursing units in each of the systems’ five hospitals (Wakefield et al.,