Analyzing Nursing Handoff Communication

Nursing Handoff Communication This research work will be carried out on medical, rehabilitation and surgical wards in a couple of fairly large Australian hospitals with mostly six beds in each room and some double and single rooms as well. In one of the hospitals, bedside handover is being employed since a year or so, and nursing teams are also utilized, while in the second hospital, bedside handover is a new introduction and various models of nursing are utilized; the former (i.e., bedside handover) has superseded staff room-centered verbal handover.

Aside from nursing personnel, team leaders (individuals in charge of managing a nursing unit and patient subgroup), nurse educators, nurse managers, and shift coordinators (responsible for overall ward functioning, typically together with the responsibility of team leadership), will be this research's focus (Smith & Mishra, 2010; Carroll, Williams & Gallivan, 2012). The condition for inclusion for nurses as well as patients is engagement in handoff because of any handover between shifts or any transfer event.

But no exclusion condition is stipulated, since the ward wherein the research is conducted has only adult patients. The research team will seek and obtain consent from the leaders for the acute care as well as surgical units to be studied. Patient and nurse integrity, together with data derived from observations of the study was treated as per the Helsinki declaration of 1964 and its amended versions, which are intended for protecting study respondents (World Medical Association, 2013).

Hospitals for the study's purpose will be chosen on the basis of easy access and researcher proximity, and for both groups of participants (i.e., nurses and patients), the net sample size will be over ten. Researchers' rationale behind this sample size is: it will be sufficiently representative of target population as well as sufficient for collecting adequate data for helping achieve the study's aim (Halm, 2013).

Sampling Strategy Convenient sampling will be utilized, where each post-operative nursing handoff communication, which is anticipated to occur when the observer isn't preoccupied with another observation, will be deemed as eligible. Study duration will be 7 days (2 days utilized for clinical testing of included checklist) of diverse lengths from End-February to mid-March of 2016. Data collection will be done by employing the checklist in the course of, and immediately subsequent to, individual handoff communications.

Nonparticipant observers in the research will also be made to jot down short notes for ensuring that no important information is missed during handoff communications. A digital stopwatch will be used for measuring overall handoff time. Principally, patient age, operation type, and other relevant patient information were retrieved at the time of handoff communication (Manser & Foster, 2011; Philibert, 2009). Convenience sampling facilitates the process of relevant information/data gathering, which wouldn't be possible through the use of probability sampling, which necessitates a more formal population record access.

Convenience sampling permits maximized data collection in the time spent by the researcher at the hospitals. Research Design A descriptive research design was utilized; a case study was conducted, of the process of bedside handover at three wards from each of a couple of fairly big Australian hospitals (i.e., six wards in total). This design was deemed as being suitable for serving the study's purpose. This methodological design typically utilizes mixed techniques for performing an instrumental analysis bounded by time and place.

Case studies pose 'why', 'how', and 'what' questions in an artificial, non-controlled environment, for analyzing current, real-life scenarios with their respective complexities (Halm, 2013). A review of literature helps to present a thorough and comprehensive collection of evidence, which describes research findings with regard to the conceptual model selected for guiding the analysis. In this study's case, conceptualization was done using Donabedian's model for assessing performance quality in health service delivery (Donabedian, 1992). The model consists of 3 components; process, structure, and outcome.

Quality assessment is performed through an appraisal of processes and structures, and connecting these with outcomes. The assumption is that outcomes are influenced by processes, which are, in turn, impacted by structures. Structures entail organizational and physical characteristics; processes imply what's actually carried out; and outcome implies what is achieved. Evaluation of any system or quality facet aims at causal links.