Strategies to Improve Post-procedural Safe Patient Handoffs

STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE SAFE PATIENT HANDOFFS AND POST PROCEDURAL FLOW During patient transfers from one care unit to another, it is imperative for patient safety and satisfaction that timely and complete communication between staff occurs. In an academic tertiary care medical center, a team consisting of representatives from 6 patient care units used improvement methods of operational excellence to improve patient centered movement. The goal of this project was to improve the percentages of two questions related to information sharing on the FY2018 AHRQ Culture of Patient Safety Survey. Using baseline metrics to reflect the current state of patient wait times and performing a detailed root cause analysis, resulted in the establishment of several countermeasures. Through problem statement development, current state mapping, and fishbone diagramming six joint KPIs were developed for post Kaizen implementation and sustainment. Next steps include reviewing results of the 2018 Culture of Safety Survey, using champions of this work to coach other teams on joint KPI development and implementation and hardwiring ideal state map tool utilizing multiple waves of joint KPIs between 2-3 departments