Standardized Bedside Reporting

One of the goals of healthcare is to ensure that the patients get the best service possible while not compromising on the satisfaction and goodwill of the nurses and other healthcare professionals. A key aspect of ensuring quality healthcare is the consistent handling of patient information from nurse to nurse during shifts; information handled wrongly can jeopardize the patients’ health (Baker, 2010). It is important to implement procedures that ensure consistent and smooth handling of patient information from nurse to nurse to increase patient safety and improve nurse satisfaction. This paper will explore the merits of standardized bedside reporting as opposed to board reporting in ensuring a positive outcome and consistent quality healthcare.

Change model overview

A key aspect in determining whether bedside shift reporting has any merits over board reporting is the John Hopkins Nursing Evidence-Based Practice Process (JHNEBP). The John Hopkins Nursing Evidence-Based Practice Process is a framework for guiding the translation and synthesis of evidence into valid healthcare practice. JHNEBP has three cornerstones that include research, education, and practice; the framework ensures that research evidence is the basis of clinical decision-making. (Dearholt & Dang, 2012) The implementation of the John Hopkins Nursing Evidence-Based Practice Process has three key phases, the first phase is the identification of an important question, the second phase involves the systematic review of research evidence, and the third phase is translating the results into action. Nurses should use the JHNEBP process because it provides a clear way for healthcare professionals to translate research results into healthcare practice.

Practice Question

The team includes several key stakeholders who will benefit greatly from my research. Among the team members include myself as ER nurse, charge nurse, ERT ( Emergency room tech), nurse case manager, nurse supervisor, physician and hospital manager.

The evidence-based practice question that the team members will explore is “Does the use of a standardized bedside report versus board reporting help increase patient safety, nurse satisfaction, and positive outcome?” The evidence-based practice question assesses the ability of bedside shift reporting to improve healthcare provision. The practice area of the question is clinical. The practice issue came about because of assessing risk management concerns in ensuring good health practices. To answer the question, the team members gathered evidence from patient preferences, peer-reviewed journals, and clinical guidelines. The team members searched peer-reviewed journal databases to gather relevant information from previous research that could affect the results.

Understanding the merits of bedside shift reporting as opposed to board reporting is important as most healthcare organization use either strategy in collecting and passing on patient information (Groves, Manges, & Scott-Cawiezell, 2016). Both bedside reporting and board reporting have their merits, however, for the interest of ensuring the best possible healthcare for the patient and nurse satisfaction, it is important to identify which is the best. The problem affects healthcare on a broader scale because all healthcare organizations collect patient information. Identifying the best strategy for collecting and disseminating patient information among nurses will lead to an improvement in healthcare all over the world (Jeffs, et al., 2013).

The results of the research will help each of the team members improve their ability to offer quality healthcare. The charge nurse, nurse supervisor, and charge nurse will consider the problem and implement both strategies in their daily work; the nurses will then document information about their satisfaction, quality of healthcare and patient preference. After collecting information, the team members, including the hospital manager and the physician will assess the results and determine the merits of a standardized bedside report.

Evidence

In collecting information about the problem, the bulk of the evidence was in peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of Nursing Care and the Journal of Emergency Nursing. The information in the peer-reviewed journals assessed the merits of standardized bedside reports in healthcare organizations of various sizes all over the United States of America. The peer-reviewed research adhered to very stringent quality standards ensuring high-quality information and conclusions on the best health care improvement strategies.

The search involved four peer-reviewed journals that tacked the merits of bedside shift reporting. A common line of thought in all the peer-reviewed journals were that nurse’s experiences and perceptions, as associated with the implementation of standardized bedside shift reporting, improved dramatically (Ferguson & Howell, 2015). The researchers assessed the quality of health care, patient and nurse satisfaction in healthcare organizations that utilized standardized reporting for over four years and in institutions where bedside shift reporting was in use for only a period of one week; in both instances, the researchers recorded distinct improvements in the nurse’s ability to seamlessly exchange patient information (Groves, Manges, & Scott-Cawiezell, 2016). Furthermore, the researchers also noted that the use of standardized beside reports over board reporting enabled patients to take a more active role in their healthcare (Jeffs, et al., 2013). The researchers observed an improvement in nurse satisfaction because of increased nurse accountability and safety due to the implementation of a standardized bedside report (Baker, 2010).

Based on the evidence and the conclusions of the peer-reviewed journals, my recommendation is to implement standardized bedside reporting as the core method of patient reporting as improving patient safety and efficient reporting structure in all healthcare organizations. Nurses, healthcare managers, and physicians should implement standardized bedside reporting on a pilot basis before overhauling the whole patient recording system.

Translation

The implementation of the plan for the research will take place over a period of one month. Before attempting to implement this process, hardwired leader rounding in staff and leader rounding on patients to ensure staff are engaged and that process in place to obtain feedback from patients. (Baker, 2010) The healthcare organization will spit the nurses into two groups; one group will use standardized bedside reports and the other group will make do with board reporting. At the end of the one-month period, the nurses will evaluate their data and outline the merits of standardized bedside reporting over board reporting.

The desired outcome is that standardized bedside reporting will emerge as the best information recording and handoff strategy. The nurses will evaluate information collected in the pilot study using quality of healthcare, nurse satisfaction, and patient safety as metrics. The stakeholders will receive the results in the form of a presentation outlining the merits of standardized bedside reports.

The next step is assessing whether the results apply to the entire healthcare organization and all its units. I will stress the positive results of the standardized bedside reports and the need to improve healthcare in a bid to get the stakeholders to implement the strategy permanently. I will communicate the results internally through an internal memo and externally through an entry in a peer-reviewed journal. This will first be implemented throughout the ED to ensure the standing operating procedure is worked out to perfection. After that, extending on a larger scale will mean taking this plan to all units in the hospital by meeting with managers and coordinators.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the use of standardized bedside reporting has clear advantages over board reporting (Ferguson & Howell, 2015). Standardized bedside reporting leads to improvements in healthcare provision. Patient outcomes associated with bedside shift reporting include increased patient satisfaction, enhanced safety and increased patient satisfaction. (Jeffs, et al., 2013) In addition, the change model for implementing standardized bedside reporting should utilize the Johns Hopkins Nursing evidence-based model of practice, evidence, and translation; this allows the best implementation.