Transition of Care: The Evaluation of Hand-Off Communication between Emergency Department and Medical/Surgical Nursing Units

Hand-off communication from the emergency department (ED) to inpatient nurses is an important process for transfer of safe and quality patient care from one department to another. Annually, there are130.4 million ED visits with 12.2 million of those visits resulting in hospital admission, providing ample opportunities for poor communication (Rui, Kang, & Albert, 2013). Miscommunications during patient hand-off are estimated to contribute to 80% of adverse events (The Joint Commission, 2012). This theory-driven, quality improvement project sought to evaluate the hand-off communication process between nurses from the ED and nurses in the inpatient Medical/Surgical units using human factors System Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) approach, originally created by Pasqual Carayon in 2006.;An online survey was created using an adapted SEIPS Model evaluating the interactive concepts of person, tools and technologies, tasks, organization, and environment and their impact on staff and patient outcomes. The survey was distributed to both the ED and Medical/Surgical nurses to gain their perspective on the interdepartmental hand-off communication process and how it impacts the staff and patient outcomes. There as an included option for the bedside nurses to provide recommendations on how to improve the hand-off communication process. Data was collected, anonymously, through an online database and descriptive statistics were used to analyze the results.;The quality improvement project found that majority of nurses prefer verbal hand-off communication with a structured standard format of delivery in conjunction with the electronic health record. The project found that nurses perceive that the nurse-to-patient ratio and surrounding tasks impact the effectiveness and quality of hand-off communication. The most common suggested hand-off communication improvements were to not allow hand-off communication or transfer of the patient from the ED to the Medical/Surgical unit during peak times, such as shift change, and to follow up on tools and technology compliance. Overall, the person, the tools and technologies, the tasks, and the environment are contributing to ineffective hand-off, while the organization has adequately provided the resources the staff needs to perform an effective hand-off communication. All of which were concluded to have an impact on the staff and patient outcomes.