Essay On Bedside Handover

Introduction:
In March 2016, I have undertaken a quality improvement project (QIP) in my seven weeks of placements working in the surgical short stay unit (SSU) under SJOGMPH. The project aim is to improve the quality and safety of patients’ care by changing the existing handover practice to a structural bedside handover system. This report will firstly describe the QIP and analytically reflect the experiences of developing the QIP using the Levett-Jones clinical reasoning Model (Levett-Jones et al., 2010). Then it will focus on reflection of delivering the QIP presentation and viewing other student’s QIP presentation.

Quality Improvement Plan (QIP):
Background and Rationale:
During my seven week placement with SSU, I receive several patients’ complaints about miscommunication problem of the health professionals. There is also an increasing number of call bell initiated by the patients related to their treatment plan. I realise that this problem can be resolved by having a bedside handover system in place which can help to clarify patients’ concerns and reduced their call bell usage. Also, implementing a systematic bedside handover in SSU complies with the standard six in the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards (NSQHS) (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2012) (ACSQHC). Therefore, I choose bedside handover to be my QIP.

It helps to improve the communication channel between the staffs and the patients and to increase the nurse accountability (Baker, 2010; Kent, Stevens, Patterson, & Plunkett, 2010). However, I realised that bedside handover may significantly increase the handover duration. Therefore, I started my research in this aspect and I found out that bedside handover did not increase handover duration (Bradley & Mott,