Nursing Handover Written Guideline Implementation: A Way to Improve Safe Performance of Nurses in Intensive Care Units

In the health centers, clinical data is regularly transferred between health care personnel. The most widespread of these handoffs are the inter-shift nursing reports, which occur several times in a day and could facilitate patient care plan, patient safety and continuity of care. But previous studies and clinical experience have indicated that there is no program for this major purpose.

This study was accomplished to investigate the effect of nursing handover written guideline implementation on the performance of respiratory and cardiac nursing care of hospitalized ICU patients.

This was a quasi-experimental one group pretest/post study on 56 nurses working in Intensive Care Unit in Qhaem Hospital who were conveniently selected. The safety performance level of nursing care were evaluated before and after implementation of written guideline using self-structured checklist of performance evaluation of nursing care. Validity and reliability of this instrument was determined by Content Validity Index and Inter Rater Reliability (r=0.95). Data were analyzed using statistical tests including paired t test, Wilcoxon and one-way Anova with SPSS version 11.5.

The results showed that cardiac nursing care performance increased from 1.5±0.6 before intervention to 2.7±0.9 after intervention and in the domain of respiratory care from 9.3±1.9 to 14.5±1.7 which was accompanied with 80% and 55.9% increase, respectively. This difference was significant in cardiac domain based on Wilcoxon test and in respiratory domain using paired t-test (p<0/001).

Development of a regulated, practical and comprehensive standard protocol to transmit crucial and relevant information related to the patient care will improve the nurses performance of respiratory-cardiac nursing care.