Quality improvement project: detecting, instigating and assessing effective handover techniques

Safe handover is integral to patient safety. Since the implementation of the European Working Time Regulations, doctors' working patterns have largely moved to a full shift system. Consequently, there is now greater need for numerous thorough handovers between medical teams. According to the Royal College of Physicians report, poor handover between doctors is a common cause of error in hospitals, and is a major preventable cause of patient harm. Therefore, a number of initiatives have been devised by the Royal College of Physicians and British Medical Association over the last two years in an attempt to standardise the system to reduce errors.1 2 As Junior doctors we recognised that our medical team weekend handover system was an area needing improvement. The Weekend doctor had to collate handover information from multiple emails which was time consuming and tedious. The Quality Improvement team aimed to optimise staff efficiency by improving the weekend handover system by; enabling easy assimilation and identification of patients requiring on–call SpR and SHO review, creating a standardised word document template for handover saved onto a shared network drive accessible to all doctors, evaluating the effectiveness of the new template by assessing perceptions of the new system prior to and after it was introduced. We developed an anonymised online questionnaire for senior house officers and specialist registrars. Questions included; the time taken to collate the weekend...
Source: Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry - Category: Neurosurgery Authors: Tags: Association of British Neurologists (ABN) joint meeting with the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), London, 23-24 October 2013 Source Type: research