Bedside Reporting

Within the dynamics of hospital care, crucial emphasis rests on the transition between shifts when nurses must exchange reports on current patient information. Conventional wisdom long held that such reporting should be done at a centralized nurses’ station far from the patients themselves, despite frequent interruptions and the necessity of providing redundant information to clarify which patients were being discussed. It was felt that discussing a patient’s condition and prognosis within earshot of the patient might create alarm. In the early 1980s, as part of the burgeoning patient rights movement, nursing staffs began to transition shift reporting to the patients’ bedsides, thus allowing the patients to become part of the process.

Overview

Clear staff communication is critical in busy hospitals. When shifts change over, nurses must provide incoming staff with essential information about each patient’s condition. That process creates opportunities for information error. The move to the protocol of bedside reporting has been at the forefront of patient-centered care. Including the patient in this exchange of information allows the patient to participate, to add information, to qualify information, and thus to help shape care assessments, making such assessments more up-to-date and valuable. The practice further promotes transparency between the staff and patients and minimizes the possibility of the patient enduring unnecessary anxieties or paranoia, thus making the care and recovery more efficient and more patient-directed. The protocol of bedside recovery recognizes that, given the wide access patients have to Internet sources, it is better to include them in the process rather than have them operating under unreliable information. Patients furthermore find greater satisfaction in their health care and respond better to their treatment and maintain more productive and personal relationships with the staff, as do the families of the patients. Additionally, the hospital staff itself works more cooperatively with patient care information, thus minimizing the chance for errors or redundant procedures.

Nevertheless, nursing staff continue to follow common sense limits when, for instance, patients might react badly to treatment information or when patients have mental deficiencies that might make the dynamic of sharing information impractical. Plus, some patients are simply uncomfortable talking forthrightly about their condition and their treatment progress; in such cases nurses regularly screen the kind of patient care information that is shared bedside and that which is shared out of the patient’s range. However, data has shown that providing patients with access through bedside reporting not only protects the nursing staff by decreasing the likelihood of mistakes in treatment, but also minimizes patient fears by providing a smooth transition between shifts rather than the feeling of meeting new faces and of being abandoned by the nursing staff they had come to know. Most importantly, by foregrounding shift communication, bedside reporting creates a more harmonious and more structured hospital work staff.

Bibliography

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