NURSES' SAFETY BRIEFING FOR PATIENT HANDOFF IN THE ICU

HYPOTHESIS AND MAIN GOALS. Safety Briefing improves the effectiveness of the information exchange process of patient handoffs and strengthens the safety culture. The goal was to design a Safety Briefing for standardizing the exchange process of sensible information at the patient handoffs in an intensive care unit (ICU). The subsidiary goals were: evaluate the impact on the safety culture and the communication between professionals, describe the methodology for filling the information into the Briefing for every shift and collect and discuss the professional's opinions about the use of it. METHODS. This is a prospective intervention study. We designed a Briefing and it was introduced into the nurses' patient handoffs for a period of six months. Surveys before and after the introduction of the Briefing were conducted to evaluate the impact of the Safety Briefing on the nurses' safety culture and information exchange. A total of 23 nurses participated in the experiment. The presented results have been analyzed with Chi-squared and Fisher's tests. RESULTS. Nurses reported a change in the quality of oral communications. The proposed Briefing was used on the 80.2 % of the patient handoffs. Most of the subjects evaluating the proposed Briefing considered that its usage not only speeded up the information exchange process, but also improved the quality of the information. CONCLUSIONS. The change of the nurses' perceptions in the quality of the oral communications when using the Briefing, the elevated number of information exchanges carried out with the proposed tool and the good reviews received from the nursery team, give us a conclusion that the Safety Briefing is an effective tool for information exchange which can also improve the critical patient's safety. However, there is still no conclusive evidence of improvement regarding to safety culture or general oral communication.