Patient safety culture and handoff evaluation of nurses in small and medium-sized hospitals.
Jung Hee Kim, Jung Lim Lee, Eun Man Kim
PMID 33575446WHAT IT FOUND
Most nurses in small and medium-sized hospitals reported handoff errors and lacked written guidelines.
Nurses with formal handoff education and access to checklists rated their handoffs higher. Interruptions were the top reason for dissatisfaction.
Key findings
0177.4% of participants reported no written guidelines or checklists for handoffs in their ward.
02Nurses who had both handoff guidelines and checklists gave the highest handoff evaluations, while those with neither gave the lowest.
03Interruptions by outsiders, phone calls, or visits were the most common reason for dissatisfaction with handoffs, cited by 31.4% of respondents.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study did not compare results across different hospital sizes, limiting generalizability to large centers. The analysis did not isolate the effect of specific handoff methods (e.g., Kardex vs. EMR) on evaluation scores. Self-reported data on errors and perceptions may be subject to recall or social desirability bias.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflict of interest. The research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the association between having guidelines and higher handoff scores as proof that simply printing a checklist improves patient safety. The study is cross-sectional and relies on self-reported perceptions, so it cannot establish that the guidelines caused the better outcomes or reduced actual adverse events.