Bringing I-PASS to the Bedside: A Communication Bundle to Improve Patient Safety and Experience

Boston Children's Hospital

Status: Completed

Conditions: Communication

Treatments: Behavioral: Patient and Family Centered I-PASS

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT02320175

CDR-1306-03556

Details and patient eligibility

About

Patient and Family-Centered I-PASS is a bundle of communication interventions to improve the quality of information exchange between physicians, nurses, and families, and to better integrate families into all aspects of daily decision making in hospitals. This project tests the hypothesis that rates of medical errors and adverse events (primary outcome), hospital experience, communication, and shared understanding will improve following implementation of Patient and Family Centered I-PASS, as compared with current practice.

Full description

We conducted an intervention study on pediatric inpatient units in seven North American hospitals. Each site was assigned to one of 3 staggered waves of implementation and data collection. The Patient and Family Centered I-PASS intervention included a health literacy-informed, structured communication framework for family-centered rounds; written rounds summaries for families; a training and learning program; and strategies to support teamwork and implementation. We measured errors and adverse events (AEs) via an established systematic surveillance methodology, family experience via pre-discharge surveys, and communication processes via direct observations.

Enrollment: 6,478 patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• All patients admitted to the pediatric inpatient study units of participating hospitals
• Parents/caregivers of patients less than 18 years of age who speak English, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, or Spanish
• Nurses working on these units
• Residents working on these units
• Medical students working on these units

Exclusion criteria

• Parents/caregivers who do not speak a study language (decided based on the 5 most commonly spoken languages across study sites; study languages include: English, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Spanish)
• Parents/caregivers of patients greater than 18 years of age

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Non-Randomized

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

---

6,478 participants in 2 patient groups

Pre-intervention

No Intervention group

Description:

Before implementation of Patient and Family Centered I-PASS.

Post-intervention

Experimental group

Description:

After implementation of Patient and Family Centered I-PASS.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Patient and Family Centered I-PASS