Advanced Clinician Scientist-Programm 2023

Thema: "Communication in Patient Transfer in the Emergency Room: a chance to improve patient safety."

Zusammenfassung:
Patient safety must be a major concern for all parties involved in medical treatment, especially because 1 of 2 harmful incidents is preventable1. Causing or contributing factor in around 70% of these adverse events is low-quality communication2,3. The most important and frequent information exchange during medical treatment is the patient handover which poses as a recurrent key element in medical workflow. Because of known limitations of non-guided patient handover (e.g., omission of key information)4, different tools to provide structure to these conversations have been developed. It has been demonstrated that these frameworks can improve team communication5 and patient safety6 by reducing adverse events7. Nevertheless, these tools are not as prevalent as eligible. The most substantiated explanation is that the beneficial effect of using a standardized conversation framework is not immediately apparent8 like it is for example for surgery preparation checklists. But how can the same progress be made in patient handover communication? ISOBAR (Identification-Situation-Observation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation) is a framework for patient transfer and recommended by the WHO9. In this randomized controlled intervention trial, we would like to compare ISOBAR to common practice by means of key information transfer efficiency and evaluate its feasibility in the daily routine of an interdisciplinary emergency room. We expect higher communication efficiency and information retention with ISOBAR.