Bedside Shift Report: A way to improve patient safety

Abstract

Patient safety is one of the top quality improvement priorities for healthcare organizations. Patient safety affects many aspects of health care including patient satisfaction, sentinel events, and medical errors, as well as hospital reimbursements. Communication is one area that hospitals are diligently improving on to prevent medical error sand sentinel events. Bedside shift report (BSR) is a practice that not only improves patient safety, but it also enhances the quality of care and decreases unnecessary healthcare expenditures. Bedside Shift Report (BSR) is one of the many strategies hospitals around the United States are taking to improve patient safety as well as patient experience and involvement in their care. The purpose of this project is to evaluate the attitudes of nurses after the implementation of bedside shift report at a local hospital in Commerce Township, Michigan. For three weeks, a survey was distributed to nurses at the hospital. The results were collected, interpreted, and suggestions were given to the hospital administrators on how to improve nurses attitudes on BSR. By understanding the nurses’ attitudes, hospital administrations will be able to address the barriers and issues that nurses have in participating with bedside shift report.