Quality Improvement of Nursing Handover in Cardiothoracic Surgery Intensive Care Unit

Abstract

Nursing handover is a process for transferring patient information by nurse from one period to the following  period for continuous nursing care. This developmental study aimed to improve the quality of nursing  handover in Cardiothoracic surgery intensive care unit, Buddachinaraj Phitsanulok Hospital, from August  2017 to January 2018 by using nine steps of continuous quality improvement process: finding a process to  improve, organized a team that known the process, clarifying current knowledge of the process, understand  caused of process variation, selected the process improvement, planed the improvement, did the improvement, checked the results and acted to hold the gain and continuous improvement combined with  SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation). The research instruments were records of  characteristics, group interview guideline, observation checklist regarding nursing handover's practice and  incident report record. Data were analyzed and presented by frequency and percentage. Qualitative data  were analyzed by content analysis. The results revealed that after using this process, registered nurses could  completely and correctly perform more than 80.0% of nursing handover protocol. There was no incident from  nursing handover and nurses had a high satisfaction level of 64.3% in the handover protocol. The  suggestion after using the process was this protocol should be used continuously because nurse practice team was unfamiliar with handover forms. Therefore, this protocol could help nursing handover effectively  with good outcomes of patients. Administrators should apply this protocol to improve nursing handover's  quality to other care units