Patient Care Handoff in the Postanesthesia Care Unit: A Quality Improvement Project.
OBJECTIVE
The goal of this project was to improve the process of transferring patient information between certified registered nurse anesthetists and postanesthesia care unit registered nurses using an evidence-based handoff checklist and evaluate completeness and accuracy of transferred information.


METHODS
A convenience sample of 14 certified registered nurse anesthetists and 7 registered nurses working at a single regional health system was recruited.


METHODS
The Handoff Accuracy Scoring Tool was developed to include a pre-/postinterventional design to compare scores of verbal handoffs conducted in the preintervention phase without checklist (n = 20) and postintervention phase with checklist (n = 20).


RESULTS
An unpaired sample t test revealed that differences in scores between the preintervention phase (mean = 9.50, standard deviation = 3.36) and postintervention phase (mean = 20.9, standard deviation = 1.74) were statistically significant (t[19] = 13.21; P = .0001; 95% confidence interval = [9.59, 13.21]).


CONCLUSIONS
A department-specific handoff checklist can reduce the number of omission errors that may occur during patient handoff.
Gregory M
GM
Bruno
Mary Elizabeth Betsy
ME
Guimond
D006801:Humans; D062209:Patient Handoff / Q000592:standards*; D016528:Postanesthesia Nursing; D058996:Quality Improvement
communication handoff; omission errors; patient handoff; transfer of care