Bedside Shift Reporting in an Acute Hospital Setting

CAPSTONE PROJECT: BEDSIDE SHIFT REPORTING IN AN ACUTE HOSPITAL SETTING
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Capstone Project: Bedside Shift Reporting in an Acute Hospital Setting
Background
In the healthcare industry, the patients are the center of the practice. It can be said that the main and only goal of hospitals and healthcare organizations is to promote the overall well-being of a person. However, it can still be well-noted that even in organizations as critical as healthcare centers, mistakes can still be made because there are still human components to the industry. While technology has advanced well enough to make significant changes in nursing and medical processes, the main figures who take action are human nurses, practitioners, and other healthcare professionals. Needless to say, they are still capable of making mistakes for a myriad of reasons, no matter how people believe there is no room for mistakes when it comes to people's lives.
Shift reporting is an important process in nursing, especially during handoffs. In handoffs, off-going nurses turn over specific information and duties to nurses who will be starting their shifts. There are various traditional ways to do shift reporting, including written notes, recorded notes, and face-to-face with other nurses. This made for a good process until the technology became advanced and workloads have been increased. Now, there are multiple tools that nurses can make use of to store pertinent information, but there are still risks involved with any type of handoff. Bedside shift reporting is an alternative process where the handoff can be done bedside, with the presence of the patient and possibly their carers or their families. In this type of shift reporting, the information being passed on is not confined to the knowledge of the off-going and incoming nurses alone but also involves the patient. While bedside shift reporting is fairly new and has not yet been implemented in many hospitals for the time being, research has shown that the process was proposed as early as 1978 (Ofori-Atta et al., 2015).
Clinical Problem Statement
Bedside shift reporting is being gradually implemented in multiple healthcare institutions in the United States and globally. However, because of the differences in how different hospitals and units handle cases, there are different needs that need to be addressed for a successful transition to bedside shift reports. Furthermore, there are also disparities in terms of the standards of nursing care, especially when considering the global context (McAllen et al., 2018). Implementing bedside shift reports with standardized protocols assures that procedures are being followed religiously and that all pertinent information is transferred during handoffs. Successful implementation of bedside shift reports can improve patient safety and lower risks of complications and mistakes, as well as improve nurse performance and satisfaction. Because each patient and case are unique, the lack of standardized implementation practices contributes to an inconsistent and ineffectual bedside shift report. Hence, it is vital to ensure that there is consistency in the processes involved.
Purpose of the Change Pro...