Answer 3 for NURS 8502 Week 2 Discussion Discuss Gaps in Practice
Communication is a very important element in healthcare. According to Kourkouta and Papathanasiou (2014) communication is essential to all aspect of healthcare such as education, therapy, prevention, rehabilitation, treatment and health promotion. When poor communication occurs in healthcare, every area of healthcare is negatively affected. Poor communication or miscommunication often occurs during hand-offs. Miscommunication occurs when off going healthcare personnel leaves out a vital information such as keeping patient npo for a planned surgical procedure. When this occurs a delay or cancellation of the surgical procedure can occur which will negatively affect the care patient receives. Sometimes miscommunication in healthcare care result into adverse event. Müller, Jürgens, Redaèlli, Klingberg, Hautz, and Stock (2018) stated that poor communication during patient care hand-offs amongst healthcare providers causes greater than 50 percent of hospital. In addition to poor patient outcome, poor communication or miscommunication in healthcare can result into patient dissatisfaction, decreased compliance to treatment and counterproductive use of resources. (Tiwary, Rimal, Paudyal, Sigdel, & Basnyat, 2019)
On many occasions when I was working as bedside nurse, I have experienced incomplete or miscommunication of patient care information during hand-off reports. I have heard of incidents in which vital patient information is not reported during hand-off reports between healthcare workers. In this facility there have been reports of occasions in which vital patient care information was not shared during hand-offs. An incident occurred in the facility in which operating room nurse did not report to the post anesthesia care unit nurse or record in patient’s chart that scheduled anti-epileptic medication that she was given to her by the patient’s primary nurse to administer to patient was administered. This resulted in patient receiving another dose within two hours, a medical error.
This issue is ongoing and the organization has tried other measures such as bedside reporting to address it, but the problem prevails. It was believed that when hand-off reports are given at bedside the possibility of giving wrong or incomplete information is less likely. Healthcare workers from other organization have also reported incidents of miscommunication or poor communication during hand-off. The Joint Commission (2015) reported that miscommunication in healthcare has been linked to poor patient outcome and it has been well documented.
References
Kourkouta, L., & Papathanasiou, I. V. (2014). Communication in nursing practice. Materia Socio-Medica, 26(1), 65–67. doi: 10.5455/msm.2014.26.65-67
