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 …
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