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theses

Clear, concise, and timely communication is central to the delivery of safe, quality healthcare. Communication for the purpose of transferring or "handing over" professional responsibility of patient safety and continuity of care from one healthcare provider to another HCP is termed handover. On average, this clinical practice will occur a minimum of three times per day per hospitalized patient (Smeulers & Vermeulen, 2016). Yet, despite the efforts of nurse researchers, there remains gaps in knowledge as to which handover style represents best practice. Furthermore, while there is a plethora of evidence available regarding interdepartmental handover, there has been little research conducted concerning emergency department (ED) admission handovers. Following a retrospective, observational cohort design with pre- and post-intervention data sampling, this quality improvement (QI) project sought to enhance the quality of nurse-to-nurse handover and improve patient safety. The project spanned one month and was conducted at a suburban, academic hospital located in Southern New Jersey. The Knowledge to Action (K2A) framework served as the conceptual model. Comparison of pre- and post-intervention data indicated that there was not a significant reduction in MET activations post-intervention compared to pre-intervention data. Although, the treatment effect was not statistically significant enough to reject the null hypothesis, the difference between the sample groups observed does bear clinical relevance. Standardizing verbal handover using the mnemonic NURSEPASS during ED to medical telemetry unit (MTU) admission handovers led to a reduction in medical emergency team (MET) activations occurring within 6 hours of intradepartmental patient transfer, but not to a significantly measurable degree.

ETD_10006

DNP

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-k917-2718

ETD doctoral

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