Background
Nurses are responsible for addressing the health and at some point, personal needs of the patients 24 hours a day and seven days a week. They should be on call but that does not mean they are not allowed to rest. Nurses, just like other medical professionals follow a specific work schedule. After a certain number of hours, nurses have to be relieved by another nurse so that they may take a rest and get ready for another day of patient handling the following day. They typically work in shifts. It’s an effective way of dividing the workload in the hospital especially at times when there are a lot of patients to take care of. But to be able to ensure that a patient receives the treatments he need (a key nursing role), nurses have to be able to communicate directly with other nurses who handle the same patients but work in a different time shift.
The nursing plan of care is usually made consistent through endorsements in the form of end-of-shift reports. The problem that this paper tries to address is “how could the student nurses improve the current mechanism of submitting end of shit reports to staff nurses?”
End-of-Shift Reports
According to Stinger (2012), the process of preparing end-of-shift reports is most often rushed; she also noted that nurses (both student and registered nurses) usually underestimate its importance. Although the format and process of preparing and submitting these reports can be totally different from one hospital to another, there are ways that hospital nurses working in different time shifts can do to ensure that the patient gets a properly managed and coordinated treatment plan.
Use of a Cheat Sheet
Nurses could definitely use a variety of resources from various research bodies. However, nurses should make sure that they will only use resources that are scholarly, peer-reviewed and is backed by evidence, as stipulated in the core competence section of the SON Framework.
Using a standardized end-of-shift report will make the process of filling it with the necessary information faster. However, it has been proven by Chan et al. (2010), that it would be more effective in the long run to train student nurses to prepare end-of-shift reports manually and using a standardized sheet. That way, they will be able to adapt to the different end-of-shift report practices should they be transferred or reassigned to other institutions. According to Nelson & Massey (2010), it would be even more effective to make the change-of-shift digital. That would not only be fast but also convenient for the nurses and the patients.
Safety Considerations
Students early on their nursing internship program should be trained how to identify key areas crucial to ascertain the patients’ safety while undergoing treatment (Triplett & Scguveiller, 2011). Some of the most common errors that student nurses commit include: failure to include information about the patient’s allergies, current medications, overall status, and presence of other systemic diseases. All of these are crucial to the implementation of the nursing roles because they can dictate the type of treatment that the medical team, not just the nurses, can consider. Disregarding these factors will most often lead to adverse events and suboptimal patient care (Welsh et al., 2010). Student nurses should be able to learn how to easily spot and identify this key patient information. They should also be able to report everything that they were able to document about the patient to the staff nurses through an end-of-shift report using the standardized format in their hospital. This will not only result to a smoother shifting but will also enable to nurses to ensure that their professional roles are all carried out.
Professional Nursing Roles
The enumerated solutions could indeed student and staff nurses realize their professional nursing roles. As a designer of care, nurses will be able to formulate their own plan of care as long as they can be certain the goals of the patient will be achieved. In fact nurses can share the design of their treatments to student nurses and interns. As a coordinator and manager of care, it is the duty of the nurses to deliver a coordinated and smooth plan of care that should also be in line with the goals of the patient and the nurse’s goal for the patient. Employing the different possible solutions enumerated above can definitely help nurses achieve their roles as a coordinator and manager of care. As long as a nurse can communicate with other nurses who work at different time shifts through proper documentation and proper endorsement using an end-of-report, there should be no reason to mismanage those three roles.
Works Cited
Chan, S., Chan, W., Cheng, Y., Fung, O., Lai, T., Leung, A., Leung , K., Li, S., Yip, A., Pang, S. (2010). Development and Evaluation of an Undergraduate Training Course for Developing International Council of Nurses Disaster Nursing Competencies in China. Hongkong: Journal of Nursing Scholarship.
Nelson, B., & Massey, R. (2010). Implementing an electronic change-of-shift report using transforming care at the bedside processes and methods. Texas, USA: Journal of Nursing Administration.
Stringer, H. (2012). Tips for a smooth nursing shift change. Nursing Link. Accessed April 2012. Available at http://nursinglink.monster.com/training/articles/6023-tips-for-a-smooth-nursing-shift-change.
Triplett, P., & Scguveiller, C. (2011). EB107: Nurses’ End-of-Shift Report Process and Implementation of a Standardized Report Format Tool and Bedside Handoff. Critical Care Nurse Vol 31 Issue 2.
Welsh, C., Flanagan, M., & Ebright, P. (2010). Barriers and facilitators to nursing handoffs: recommendations for redesign. Indianapolis, USA: Nursing Outlook.
