ICU Attending Handoff Practices: Results From a National Survey of Academic Intensivists.

Objectives: To characterize intensivist handoff practices and expectations and to explore perceptions of the patient safety implications of attending handoffs. Design: Cross-sectional electronic survey administered in 2014. Setting: One hundred sixty-nine U.S. hospitals with critical care training programs accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. Subjects: Academic intensivists were recruited via e-mail invitation from a database of 1,712 eligible academic intensivists. Interventions: None. Measurements and Main Results: Six hundred sixty-one intensivists completed the survey (completion rate, 38.6%). Responses were received from at least one individual at 147 of 169 unique hospitals (87.0%) represented in the study database. Five hundred seventy-three (87%) respondents reported participating in handoffs at the end of each ICU rotation. A variety of communication methods were used for end-of-rotation handoffs, including in-person discussion (92.9%), telephone calls (83.9%), e-mail messages (69.0%), computer-generated documents (64.6%), and text messages (23.6%). Mean satisfaction with current handoff process was rated as 68.4 on a scale from 0 to 100 (SD, 22.6). Respondents (55.4%) said that attending handoffs should be standardized, but only 13.3% (76/572) of those participating in end-of-rotation handoffs reported using a standardized process. Specific handoff topics, including active clinical issues and resuscitation status, were reportedly discussed less frequently than would be ideal (p

from #Medicine via ola Kala on Inoreader http://ift.tt/1Msif9l
via IFTTT