Bedside Nursing Handovers in the Surgical Context

University of Eastern Piedmont

Status: Completed

Conditions: General Surgery

Treatments: Behavioral: Education for improving bedside handovers; Behavioral: Education for improving handovers quality

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03465839

UPO1

Details and patient eligibility

About

Nursing handovers are performed 2-3 times a day for each patient, with an approximate average of 2 million nursing deliveries per year in a hospital of medium size. Nursing handovers are considered essential for the continuity and safety of care. If the relevant clinical information is not shared in a precise and timely manner, it may worsen the patients' outcomes with an increase in adverse events, delays or inappropriate treatment until the omission of procedures.

The modality of nursing delivery presents, therefore, a gap of vulnerability where vital information could not be considered and systematically shared.

Patients should be involved in their care to promote a patient-centred approach. The involvement of patients in handovers is effective compared to other delivery methods.

To date, however, the best mode to deliver handovers was still unclear due to a systematic lack of studies to identify the best practice of nursing handovers. The studies in the literature lack of sound methodologies due to not randomized designs.

Thus an intervention to improve quality of handovers and to implement bedside handovers in surgical wards will be performed.

The following hypotheses were made:

• The introduction of nursing bedside handovers will improve the quality of the information exchanged.
• The educational intervention training intervention will positively modify the nursing handovers.
• There is a relationship between the qualitative level of nursing handovers and working status (expert vs novice) of the nurses.
• There is a relationship between the qualitative level of nursing handovers and the patients' characteristics.

Enrollment: 318 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 99 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Surgical patients
• All nurses working with surgical patients who attended the educational intervention

Exclusion criteria

• Nurses who did not participate in the educational intervention
• Nursed who did not operate stably in the surgical wards included in the study
• New hired nurses

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Double Blind

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318 participants in 2 patient groups

Bedside handover

Experimental group

Description:

Education for improving handovers quality + Education for improving bedside handovers

Treatment:

Behavioral: Education for improving bedside handovers

Behavioral: Education for improving handovers quality

Control

Active Comparator group

Description:

Education for improving handovers quality

Treatment:

Behavioral: Education for improving handovers quality