Medical Staff

Help hospitalists’ communication skills during handoffs

Medical Staff Briefing, January 1, 2010

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For many physicians, taking the time to perform a thorough and effective hand off is a chore they know they should do, but culture and logistics often get in the way.

“Many of us were trained that the hand-off was not necessarily important, and we didn’t recognize the patient safety implications of that gap in care,” says Arpana R. Vidyarthi, MD, director of quality and safety in the division of hospital medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

However, recent research demonstrates a strong connection between hand offs and patient safety. “Poor quality handoffs are associated with the perception of near misses and a lot of uncertainty,” says Vineet Arora, MD, MAPP, assistant professor of medicine at the Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago.

About 13% of hospitalists reported an adverse event or a near miss that resulted from incomplete information provided during a service change in a recent study conducted by Vidyarthi, Arora, and colleagues.

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