The Medical Hand-Off: When to Beware

The Medical Hand-Off: When to Beware

What is often a hand-off? It’s every time a patient transfers from one set of choice to another. Common these include:

nursing where you can hospital (and back again)  hospital to rehabilitation facility  hospital to hospice care

Thousands upon a huge number of patient transfers occur daily. Articles inside the Wall Street Journal yesterday quoted the President from the organization that accredits hospitals and other health care facilities (The Joint Commission) as stating:

There are 4,000 hand-offs a day in the typical teaching hospital. If 90% go flawlessly, that’s still 400 failures each day.

The Joint Commission collaborated with 10 hospitals and systems that volunteered to participate in inside a project led with the Commission and located that transfers were defective 37% of the time. So if I do the math here, a teaching hospital which has 4,000 hand-offs a DAY could be from the average to have 1480 flawed communications PER DAY when transferring care into, or away from, a medical facility setting. Houston, we have a problem! Within the Journal article is often a link to the chart from the Commissions’ Report that documents the validated root causes for hand-off communication failures. There are 4 causes (from 20) that were identified that jumped out at me. Three in the 4 were reported by 7 of the 10 participating hospitals:

Culture will not promote successful hand-off, e.g. lack of teamwork and respect  Expectations between sender and receiver differ, Sender, who may have little expertise in a patient, is handing …

The Medical Hand-Off: When to Beware Read More