Bedside Report: Improving hand-off Shift Report in Hospital Settings Eastern International College Evelyn Terreros & Meron Gebrezgi April 26, 2013

End of shift reports between nurses has been an important process in clinical nursing practice. Allowing nurses to exchange vital patient information to ensure continuity of care and patient safety. Therefore, the chance of potential communication gaps causing an error is high. According to the Joint Commission, communication is the primary cause of medical errors, with handoffs accounting for 80% of these errors [ (Zhani, 2012) ]. The most commonly practiced model of report takes place in the staff room, at the nurses’ station, or other locations away from the patient’s bedside. However, more institutions are implementing the Bedside Report hand-off model to communicate patient care information. Research articles has identified the benefits of bedside report in conjunction with structured reporting tool (e.g. SBAR) as: (1) improvements in patient-centered care and nursing services, (2) less chance of medical errors, (3) decreasing the length of stay in patients [ (Chaboyer W, 2009) ].
Upon observing the shift to shift report in SMMC, it was evident that some nurses failed to provide effective communication and did not utilized the SBAR format tool as stated in the hospital’s guidelines. Hand-off reports were being done in the nurse’s station and along the unit’s hallways. Fatigue and distractions contributed to ineffective communication. As a result shift reports are often unstructured, repetitive, and lacked consistency in the type of information provided by each individual nurse. According to Anderson CD 2010, found that nursing report assessments are frequently subjective in their content and accompanied by judgments and labeling of patients (Anderson CD, 2010).