Significance Of Clinical Bedside Handover In The Delivery Of Holistic Healthcare Services In Australia

Problem Identification

Discuss about the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards System.

The establishment of the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality Health Care (ACSQHC) was a noble idea in the country. Since then, the commission has been helping in promoting the standards of services in the Australia’s healthcare sector (Johnson & Cowin, 2013). The consistencies in the enforcement of ACSQHC stands should be celebrated because it has successfully safeguarded the welfare of the healthcare users. One of these policy standards is the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards (NSQHS Standards) (Coleman, Redley, Wood, Bucknall & Botti, 2015). The standards have helped in the improvement of quality of services provided to the public. It has set up standards to be complied with when conducting important activities such as clinical handover. This paper presents an integrated review of the literature published on clinical handover in Australia (Bradley & Mott, 2014).   

The question to be addressed during the review is: What is the significance of clinical bedside handover in the delivery of holistic and satisfactory healthcare services to a patient?

The rationale of the topic is that clinical bedside handover is a crucial stage in the provision of healthcare services. Clinical handover is the transfer of a professional responsibility for a patient from one healthcare provider to the other. It can be done verbally, written, temporarily or permanently. There are different types of clinical handover. These are nurse to nurse handover; nurse to physician handover; GP to registrar handover; ICU to ward handover.   

Clinical bedside handover is a necessary practice because it is done to nearly all the patients. Whenever a patient is admitted to the healthcare facility, they are assigned their own nurse (Coleman, Redley, Wood, Bucknall & Botti, 2015). However, it is not practically possible for only one nurse to serve a patient right from the beginning up to the end. An in-patient, for instance, requires a temporary or permanent handover. Whereas temporary handover is done when the nurses are changing shifts, permanent handover happens during a temporary or permanent transfer of responsibility to a new practitioner to continue with it until the patient is discharged.  

The integrated review will be done on different publications. It will adopt a PICO framework. PICO simply denotes the population, intervention, comparison, and Outcome.  Each of these components will be incorporated into the review. The target population will mainly be drawn from the adult population in Australia. The intervention to be adopted is holistic care. This implies to a multifaceted kind of care that addresses all the needs of the patient. When it comes to the comparison, the review will have to involve different articles that will be critiqued and compared to determine how the standards have helped in clinical handover. Finally, the outcome of the review will be to provide a solution to the inefficiencies in clinical bedside handover (Bradley & Mott, 2014). The information from the review will be relied upon to improve the quality of clinical handover and facilitate the delivery of holistic services to the patients.

Literature Search

The literature review will be conducted by following a well-outlined procedure. After identification of the topic and review questions, the next thing to do will be to identify the keywords to use when searching for the articles. A proper choice of the search words will help in ensuring that the most relevant and useful articles are selected. Given that the search topic is the role of health standards and clinical handover in improving patient outcome, it will use the following key words: bedside clinical handover, handover, clinical handover, bedside handover and quality care, clinical handover quality care, handover quality care, and quality care. Out of all these search words, clinical bedside handover will be used as the main key words that will be relied upon to narrow down the search to specific literature (Tobiano, Chaboyer & McMurray, 2013).

The identification of the key words will be followed by the selection of the databases. Bedside clinical handover is a nursing concept on which several publications have been made. Several researchers have conducted studies clinical handover because it is an activity that has contributions to make in healthcare. However, this review will have to be carried out because it will help in providing information to fill the missing gap in knowledge. The following databases will be considered for usage: PubMed, ProQuest, MEDLINE, PsyINFO, MEDLINEPlus, PAIS Index, PopLine, and EMBASE. However, not all these databases will be utilized in the search. The databases will be narrowed down to just five: PubMed, ProQuest, MEDLINE, PsyINFO, MEDLINEPlus. These are the most preferred databases because they contain the most needed information. They have a pool of relevant and up-dated information that will be relied on in the review.

Once the databases have been selected, the next thing to do is to come up with an inclusion and exclusion criteria to follow when selecting the articles. For an article to be included, it has to meet a number of qualifications. First, the article should have been written between 2011 and 2017. It is necessary to do so because the study will only incorporate articles with current information that will be relied upon during the review. This implies that any article that was published before 2011 will have to be excluded because they do not fit. All the articles published before 2011 are old and do not have updated information that is needed (Elwyn, Dehlendorf, Epstein, Marrin, White & Frosch, 2014). The second criterion to use in the inclusion and exclusion of the articles is that the articles are discussing about clinical handover in Australia.

Data Evaluation

Any article that does not talk about clinical handover in Australia will have to be excluded from the list of resources to be used in the search. Lastly, the resources to be included in the search are journal articles. The journal article to be included must be peer-reviewed. Meaning, it must be an article written and reviewed by a team of professionals who have credibility and authority because of the reputation they have (Mardis, et al., 2016). The inclusion of peer-reviewed journals implies that non-journals will be excluded in the search. Any article that is not peer-reviewed will therefore have to be excluded because it does not meet the criteria (Elwyn, Dehlendorf, Epstein, Marrin, White & Frosch, 2014).  If all these criteria are abide by, the search will end up getting a few journal articles that are the most appropriate for usage in the review.

The review with use the above cited criteria to arrive at five articles. These are ‘A quantitative Nursing bedside clinical handover–an integrated review of issues and tools,’ ‘Bedside Adopting a patient?centred approach: an investigation into the introduction of bedside handover to three rural hospitals,’ ‘Interprofessional interactions influence nurses’ adoption of handover improvement,’ ‘Nurses discuss bedside handover and using written handover sheets,’ and ‘Attitudes of emergency department patients about handover at the bedside.’ A thorough evaluation of these articles demonstrates that they are indeed invaluable because they contain the information that that is required in the study (Osborn, Moulds, Squires, Doty & Anderson, 2014).

As explained in ‘Attitudes of emergency department patients about handover at the bedside,’ clinical bedside handover is very important because it plays a significant role in determining the satisfaction of the patient. The way in which clinical handover is done can help in influencing the recovery process. When it is done in accordance with the standards, the healthcare provider should apply the most suitable strategies. First, the healthcare providers should directly involve the patient in the handover process. ‘Bedside Adopting a patient?centred approach: an investigation into the introduction of bedside handover to three rural hospitals,’ established that the handover should be done by involving the management because it should be done in a transparent manner. The healthcare provider is supposed to be a good communicator (Johnson & Cowin, 2013). A proper communication can help in providing a smooth handover that is safe to the client at all times. These are the issues that will be addressed in the review.

‘A quantitative Nursing bedside clinical handover–an integrated review of issues and tools,’ explains a lot of issues on bedside handover because it provide exhaustive information on the positive contributions of clinical bedside handover in the delivery of high quality medical services to the patients. The two papers make a similar conclusion that bedside handover is an important activity that should be encouraged in nursing. Similar sentiments are echoed in ‘Interprofessional interactions influence nurses’ adoption of handover improvement,’ ‘Nurses discuss bedside handover and using written handover sheets,’ in which the researchers established that the practice of patient handover is appreciated by the healthcare providers and patients. ‘Interprofessional interactions influence nurses’ adoption of handover improvement,’ found that clinical handover should adopt a multidisciplinary approach because it can be effective if done in a collaborative manner.

	Author Name(s)	Article Title	Journal Article	Keywords	Database	Date Accessed
1.	Sand-Jecklin, K., & Sherman, J.	A quantitative assessment of patient and nurse outcomes of bedside nursing report	Journal of Clinical Nursing	Bedside, handover	ProQuest	12/3/2017
2.	Lu, S., Kerr, D., & McKinlay, L.	Bedside nursing handover: Patient opinions	International Journal of Nursing Practice	Bedside, handover, patient	PubMed	13/3/2017
3.	Kerr, D., Lu, S., & McKinlay, L.	Towards patient-centred care: Perspectives of nurses and midwives regarding shift to shift bedside handover	International Journal of Nursing Practice	Bedside, handover	MEDLINE	14/3/2017
4.	Lee, H., Cumin, D., Devcich, D., & Boyd, M.	Expressing concern and writing it down: an experimental study investigating transfer of information at nursing handover	Journal of Advanced Nursing	Handover nursing	PsyINFO	15/3/2017
5.	Johnson, M., Sanchez, P., & Zheng, C.	The impact of an integrated nursing handover system on nurses’ satisfaction and work practices	Journal of Clinical Nursing	Handover, nursing	MEDLINEPlus	15/3/2017

The major finding in ‘A quantitative Nursing bedside clinical handover–an integrated review of issues and tools,’ is that bedside handover is effective in the delivery of quality healthcare services to the patient. Therefore, it should be incorporated in the service-delivery whenever it is necessary to do so (Kerr, Lu & McKinlay, 2014). ‘‘Bedside Adopting a patient?centred approach: an investigation into the introduction of bedside handover to three rural hospitals,’ found out that the patients have a positive attitude towards bedside handover. However, the satisfaction of the patients depends on the strategies used by the healthcare providers during the process of temporary or permanent handover (Kerr, McKay, Klim, Kelly & McCann, 2014). The research found out that patients have different views on bedside handover. Whereas some patients believe that it is better to be served by one nurse, others hold the view that the quality of their life can be improved if they are served by different nurses.

‘Attitudes of emergency department patients about handover at the bedside’ established that bedside handover is a key component of patient-centered care. Bedside handover has been perceived so differently by the patients, mid-wives, and nurses across the country (Anderson, Malone, Shanahan & Manning, 2015). In ‘Nurses discuss bedside handover and using written handover sheets,’ the major finding is that the process of patient handover requires a proper management. One of the most important activities to undertake is documentation.

Last, but not least, ‘Interprofessional interactions influence nurses’ adoption of handover improvement,’ found out that the transfer of responsibility from one nurse to the other does not only involve the patient, but the records as well (Rathert, Wyrwich & Boren, 2013). A proper update and transfer of documents during handover can help in guaranteeing high quality services to the patients.

Conclusion

Clinical bedside handover is an activity that should be done by using the most appropriate strategies. A successful bedside handover can help in improving the quality of healthcare services rendered to the patients. A strict adherence to the review criteria enabled the researcher to use PubMed, ProQuest, MEDLINE, PsyINFO, MEDLINEPlus to get and use the four articles. These are valuable resources that contain current and updated information on clinical bedside handover. The use of these articles will help in providing information necessary in the provision of patient-centered care to the satisfaction of the patient’s diverse needs. Each of them has relevant information whose usage can help in providing deeper knowledge on the topic.

References

Anderson, J., Malone, L., Shanahan, K., & Manning, J. (2015). Nursing bedside clinical handover–an integrated review of issues and tools. Journal of clinical nursing, 24(5-6), 662-671.

Bradley, S., & Mott, S. (2014). Adopting a patient?centred approach: an investigation into the introduction of bedside handover to three rural hospitals. Journal of clinical nursing, 23(13-14), 1927-1936.

Coleman, K., Redley, B., Wood, B., Bucknall, T., & Botti, M. (2015). Interprofessional interactions influence nurses’ adoption of handover improvement. ACORN: The Journal of Perioperative Nursing in Australia, 28(1), 10.

Elwyn, G., Dehlendorf, C., Epstein, R. M., Marrin, K., White, J., & Frosch, D. L. (2014). Shared decision making and motivational interviewing: achieving patient-centered care across the spectrum of health care problems. The Annals of Family Medicine, 12(3), 270-275.

Johnson, M., & Cowin, L. S. (2013). Nurses discuss bedside handover and using written handover sheets. Journal of nursing management, 21(1), 121-129.

Kerr, D., McKay, K., Klim, S., Kelly, A. M., & McCann, T. (2014). Attitudes of emergency department patients about handover at the bedside. Journal of clinical nursing, 23(11-12), 1685-1693.

Kerr, D., Lu, S., & McKinlay, L. (2014). Towards patient?centred care: Perspectives of nurses and midwives regarding shift?to?shift bedside handover. International journal of nursing practice, 20(3), 250-257.

Mardis, T., et al., (2016). Bedside shift-to-shift handoffs: a systematic review of the literature. Journal of nursing care quality, 31(1), 54-60.

Osborn, R., Moulds, D., Squires, D., Doty, M. M., & Anderson, C. (2014). International survey of older adults finds shortcomings in access, coordination, and patient-centered care. Health Affairs, 33(12), 2247-2255.

Rathert, C., Wyrwich, M. D., & Boren, S. A. (2013). Patient-centered care and outcomes: a systematic review of the literature. Medical Care Research and Review, 70(4), 351-379.

Tobiano, G., Chaboyer, W., & McMurray, A. (2013). Family members’ perceptions of the nursing bedside handover. Journal of clinical nursing, 22(1-2), 192-200.