Best Nursing Practice for Standardizing Shift-to-Shift Reports

Best Nursing Practice for Standardizing Shift-to-Shift Reports
This paper will examine the best nursing practice for standardizing shift-to-shift reports. I became interested in this topic after hearing my mother talk about her day floating to a floor at her hospital. She received report on her patients from two different nurses that morning. Each nurse gave her different information and both were missing information that she considered vital to the care of her patients. She normally works in the ICU and on the step-down medical surgical floor, which both use a version of a template that was designed by one of the nurses to facilitate a standardized shift-to-shift report. When I attended the shift-to-shift reports in the clinical setting, I noticed that you never got a consistent picture of the patients. With the advance of the electronic medical records, the ease of finding relevant patient information has been made easier, but the shift-to-shift report is still an important tool for nurses to learn more detailed information about their patients then what is in their charts. In 2006, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) included “Standardizing communication during patient handoff (shift report)…” as one of their National Patient Safety Goals (Schroeder, 2006, p. 22). This paper will explore two articles that present evidence on different options for a shift-to-shift template and a third article talks about implementing a standardization of the shift-to-shift report in a hospital. Sara Jane Schroeder (2006) presents a quick look at a simple way to conduct shift-to-shift reports in her article entitled “Picking up the PACE: A new template for shift report.” The PACE report organizes the shift-to-shift report into four categories; Patient/Problem,