• E-mail
• Print
• RSS

New Jersey hospital develops handoff tool

Nurse Leader Weekly, March 10, 2008

Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Nurse Leader Weekly!

Instead of creating another form for staff members to fill out, administrators at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, NJ, thought that developing a simple mental tool to help nurses and transporters during the handoff process would be a better option. The Four Ps, which stands for patient name, place, procedure, and pertinent information, was developed in place of other tools, like the more popular SBAR, and has been implemented in the medical-surgical units (med-surg).

"We thought it was more of a mental process that [transporters and nurses] could put in place for themselves," says Mary Mislonka, director of materials management. "The Four Ps are easy to remember. It isn't anything that they have to start jotting down."

Targeting nurse-to-transporter handoff

Started as a performance improvement project, the Four Ps is a means of standardizing the nurse-transporter handoff. When transporters arrive to move a patient, they are prompted to use the following Four Ps as a way to remember what to ask the nurse:

• Whether it is the correct Patient
• What Place the patient is going to
• What Procedure the patient will undergo
• Any other Pertinent information a transporter may need to know about a patient

"This helped put a consistent process to it," says Gail Newton, RN, MSN, director of cardiac services. "The transporters knew what they were going to ask and the nurses knew what they were going to be asked, so it helped facilitate this happening and cut down on the time that was spent waiting."

Editor's note: This excerpt was adapted from the article "Two facilities share creative handoff strategies," featured in the Reading Room on HCPro's new online resource center, www.StrategiesForNurseManagers.com!  

Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Nurse Leader Weekly!

• Comment
• E-mail to a Colleague
• Print
• RSS
• Archive

Comments