The Importance Of Shift Change In Nursing

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Shift change is one of the challenging moments for continuity care of patient in the hospital. On shift and off shift nurses exchange vital information and duties during transition of care. In other words shift change report is also know as Nurse Knowledge Exchange (NKE), it is important in order to ensure efficiency, quality and safety of the patient. Nurses are responsible for delivering excellent care no matter what the circumstances. End of the shift nurses are exhausted and shift report usually occurs at nursing station or outside patient’s room. When it occurs away from the patient, it compromises the safety and quality of patient. Allowing patient involved in bedside report gives opportunity to hear what has occurred throughout the shift …show more content…

Involvement of patient and family during NKE at the bedside give opportunity to hear what has occurred through out the shift and next step in care. Studies found that “after implementing bedside shift report, hospitals reported increase in patient satisfaction score and improvements in nurse-patient relationship” (AHRQ, n.d.). Implementation of NKE at the bedside is not an easy process. Staff involvement with multidisciplinary team is necessary in order to monitor and feedback during implementation process. Nursing staff may resist NKE due to various reasons. We need to acknowledge and address potential challenges and concern in order to successful implementing NKE at the bedside. Step by step planning, education and training is necessary to encourage nurses to embrace the concept of NKE at the bedside. Nurses need to realize NKE at the bedside enhance quality care, nurses’ accountability and patient satisfaction. It may be helpful to implement this strategy initially on small scale like single unit first. This will help to identifying what worked well and what did not. This will give feed back then able to look for refine the approach as necessary and then spread the strategy to more units with wide scale. Nurses should be educating on how to conduct NKE at the

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