Clinical Handover Essay

The National Safety and quality Health Services (NSQHS) Standards (2012) has 10 standards to improve the health services in Australia in improving the quality of health services and delivering a safe care to the consumers and what is expected from the health system one of these is the National Clinical Handover Initiative was established under NSQHS Standards 6: Clinical Handover – the purpose of this is to improve communication between health practitioners through hand over in health care settings (ACSQHC,2010) .Clinical handover practice is recognised as an important factor in the effective transfer of patient clinical care between health clinicians ( Anderson et al,2015).

Clinical handover’s main role is to transmit relevant, accurate and current details of the patient’s treatment, health service needs, care, evaluation and clinical monitoring, and goal planning. Inadequate communication during clinical handover have been linked with irrelevant, repetitive or missing information, resulting to spending extensive

of time trying to retrieve relevant information (Manias et al. 2014).It ensures patient continuity of care, by providing the opportunity to relay the responsibility and accountability for the care of the patient from one health practitioner to another (Brown and Sims, 2014; Manias et al, 2012). The continuous quality improvement of the practices in the health care setting is essential in providing holistic care to the people, that is why change is necessary (Jones,2011).
Most organisations nowadays find the perception of change management as common but how organisations manage these changes varies entirely on the nature of the business, the changes itself and the persons involved (Shirey,2013; Campbell, 2008). Organisatons that can manage to handle changes properly appear to flourish, whilst those organisations that cannot may struggle to survive ( Jones,2011). To succeed on these changes, a key part depends on how people from the organisation deal and understand the change process ( Brownson, Chiriqui and Stamatakis,2009).

Change management is a structured approach to ensure changes are smoothly and thoroughly implemented to achieve lasting benefits of change (Freshwater, 2014). Change management is focused on significant impacts of change predominantly on people and how they move from current scenario to future status (Freshwater,2014). The change could be a simple transition or a major change to achieve the organisation’s potential ( Rufo,2012).

Change management indicates a large growing discipline that is increasingly implemented in a globalized scale by all types of organisations (Schifalacqua , Costeuo and , Demnan , 2009) It refers to a designed approach enabling adoption of change by groups or individuals in an organisation (Schifalacqua , Costeuo and , Demnan , 2009)

The success of change in the healthcare system starts with the process of implementing a planned change (Rufo, 2012).

It is also identified that the behavior’s of the team members towards change has a great impact on the success of the planned their willingness to perform the new tasks to improve the delivery of care within the system and to ameliorate (Improve) the operational effiecency of the healthcare organizations (Wright, 2002). The success of the change will also depend on the management leadership to influence the attitudes and behavioural changes that are essential to the success of change (Ojo,

2010).

In the 1950s, Kurt Lewin developed a model that is considered as one of the cornerstone for understanding organisational change. Lewin’s change model is simple and easy to understand for managing organisational change, this model is known as “Unfreeze – Change – Refreeze”. On the other hand, John Kottler’s 8 step process guides organisations avoid failure and adapt the changes needed. By improving the people’s ability to adapt changes, organisations can increase their probabilities of success both today and in the future. Without this ability to adapt, organisations cannot succeed. John Kotter has proven over the years that using his 8-step process for leading change would help organisations triumph to an ever-changing world.

To improve the quality and safety of the health consumers the OSSIE Guide to Clinical Handover Improvement was formulated and was released by the Australian Commission of Safety and Quality in Health Care in March 2009 (ACSQHC, 2010). The OSSIE Guide is a framework that focused on change management to assist in the implementation, evaluation and improvement of standardised clinical handover (ACSQHC,2010). OSSIE is a mnemonic that equates to a structure for change management plan, each letter represents a change phase: O for Organisational leadership, Simple solution development, Stakeholder engagement, Implementation, Evaluation and Maintenance (ACSQHC,2010).