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A wider view of hand-off communication

One facility ties a plan of care document to the process

After reading this article, you will be able to

1. -define the JCAHO's requirement for hand-off communication

2. -describe the benefits of having a single plan of care for each patient that is used by all units

3. -identify the JCAHO's provision-of-care standards that directly address nursing initial assessments and plans of care

Hand-off communication goes beyond the shift-to-shift, nurse-to-nurse report, according to clinical interdisciplinary team managers at Youville Hospital & Rehabilitation Center in Cambridge, MA.

So they developed a form to help them comply not only with the JCAHO's 2006 National Patient Safety Goal for hand-off communication, but to follow-up on all of their patients' initial plans of care.

"It's our ongoing hand-off for everybody," says Janet Hosta, RN, MSN, director of professional development at Youville. "We consider it to be a hand-off because it's in the record and it's reviewed by anybody taking care of the patient." (See pp. 8-9 of the PDF of this issue for a copy of Youville's form.)

Addressing a problem

When patients are admitted to Youville, staff fill out a six-page initial interdisciplinary care form that individualizes a patient's plan of care.

The problem was that the form wasn't revisited, Hosta says.

"We were not going back to the original care plan later [during the patient's stay] to update the goals," she says. "So the care plan was great on admission, but it didn't capture the sense of where we were going, and goal achievement is critical to patient progress and discharge."

This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login, subscribe, or try out BOJExtra! for 30 days.
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