Hourly Nursing Rounds

A change I would recommend for this department is for the staff to become more aware of how rounding and pain management affects the patient experience. Another suggestion based on the objective of improving patient experience would be to continue educating staff on how patient experience plays a crucial role in the reimbursement and how it impacts not only the hospital but them as well. I also recommend that the staff should continue performing rounding and pain management as if they were still being measured so that eventually these two areas will occur automatically without even having to think about it. By doing so, it will turn into a habit and will hopefully lead to a more consistent score in these two areas. New staff should also be trained that both monitoring for pain management and rounding is standard practice for the unit. As it is a lot easier to train someone new to get into this habit earlier than it is to try and implement it later after he/she has already established a routine. Staff members that have a higher role in the department must also continue to lead by example as well, in order to instill the importance of these two areas. Lastly, I recommend that the department needs to find a way to motivate and encourage staff to do rounding and pain management effectively with more internal rewards such as staff members seeing the positive impact focusing on these two areas have on patient lives.

Staffing needs affect the nursing department’s budget, staff productivity, the quality of care provided to patients and even the retention of nurses (Jooste, 2013). The nurse manager has to explain to the management of the benefits of change in providing adequate staffing all the time. Adequate staffing helps staff retention. Staff retention saves a lot of money in terms of orienting new people to the unit. Safe staffing always helps in the reduction of falls, infection rates, pressure ulcers, decrease hospital stays and death. Flexible and creative scheduling is essential for retaining staff and promoting a positive work climate (Grohar-Murray & Langan, 2011). Adequate staffing with good staffing ratio will help nurses to concentrate on their patient care which may help in a reduction in medical errors and lawsuits to the hospital.

The purpose of this article is to discuss appropriate nurse staffing and staffing ratios and its impact on patient care. Although the issue is just not about numbers as we discuss staffing we begin to see how complex the issue has become over the years. Many factors can affect appropriate nurse staffing ratios. As we investigate nurse staffing ratios we can see the importance of finding the right mix and number of nurses to provide quality care for patients.

Prior to the hourly rounding implementation, all the clinical staff (staff involved in patient care) will attend an hour workshop, which will cover the advantages and significance of hourly rounding to patient safety, reduction of falls, increase patient satisfaction, improved health outcomes, and financial impact to the organization. A video on how to do the hourly rounding properly and what behavior to avoid will be shown. After the workshop, the staff will do return demonstration, playing the role of the staff, while being checked off to ensure that the expectations during hourly rounding are met. This includes how to properly introduce oneself to the patients, informing the patients that the staff will be rounding every hour till 2200 then every two hours till 0600, to address their pain, possession, position, and potty needs. By performing return demonstrations, the validators (nurse managers, educators) will be able to ascertain that the staff understood and will

If there is a fall with injury, the manager has the ability to go back and check how long the call light was on prior to a fall. However, this information is not used to prevent and emphasize the relationship between the length of time a call light is on and the rate of fall. Most nurses and patient care technicians are not aware that the manager can back-track the call light and find out this information. To measure the rate of falls to the length of time a call light is answered, the nurse working on the project choose the histogram. This illustrates the length of time in the Y axis and the rate of falls in the X axis during the period of study (time frame). The histogram itself will include a control group, average answers, and delay answers to call light. This example was imported and modified from a previous study done comparing the numbers of call lights and nursing rounds by (Meade et al. 2006).

Patients depend on healthcare professionals through the use of call lights. Many different factors can affect a patient’s ability to function independently such as “cognitive impairments, visual loss, and decreased mobility” patients turn to call lights for assistance (Huey-Ming, 2010). Unfortunately, if a nurse or certified nursing assistant is occupied risks occur and can ultimately lead to injuries of patients due to help not received at that given moment. In the journal titled Perspectives of Patients and Families About the Nature of and Reasons for Call Light Use and Staff Call Light Response Time written by Huey- Ming Tzeng, patients felt “staff responsiveness to call lights often affect nurse-patient communication, patient

Hourly rounding is a strategy involving nurses and other health care staff to regularly “check in” on patients every hour. Because nursing staff is not reacting to call lights, patients are more content and happy; therefore nurses feel they are doing a better job helping their patients (Studer, 2007). Research has shown that rounding every hour lowers patient’s use of call lights and resultantly decreases the workload of the nurse (Leighty, 2007; Meade, Bursell, & Ketelsen, 2006; & Tipton, 2008). Performing hourly rounds has contributed to 20% less walking per shift

Hourly rounding also known as intentional rounding or comfort rounding is an initiative that hospitals nationwide are beginning to implement. Hourly rounding should be purposeful. “Hourly rounding is a systematic proactive nurse-driven evidence based intervention to anticipate and address needs in hospitalized patients” (Deitrick, Baker, Paxton, Flores, & Swavely, 2012, p.13). “Purposeful nurse rounds encompass a practice where nurses attend to and document scheduled patient reviews at pre-determined and regular intervals (hourly or second hourly)” (Lyons, Biunero, & Lamont, 2015, p.31).

You brought up a great and interesting topic. I like the topic that you picked. Fall remains one of the problems in the health care settings. Fall is dangerous to everyone, especially to the older population, because of the possible impact. I currently work in the hospital and we recently added the hourly rounding 2 years ago into our practice. I definitely think that hourly rounding if properly followed by all the staff, will decrease the falls and also increased the patient’s satisfaction. My hospital is very strict, when it comes to following the hourly rounding. Regardless how busy we are, we see the patient hourly and ask the 4 P’s. Our hospital fall decreased within 3-6 months of implementation of hourly rounding. Also, out scores for

Tzeng and Yin (2009) identified the main reasons for call light use and the impact that hourly rounds have in decreasing the call light use rate and patient falls. This study was done in a community hospital located in Michigan and used archived hospital data for analyses. The archives involved were from four adult acute care units during February 2007- June 2008: one surgical unit with 53 beds, two medical units with both totaling 87 beds and one medical-surgical combined unit with 58 beds (Tzeng, & Yin, 2009).

The purpose of this study was to identify and describe the structures, processes, and perceptions of the outcomes of bedside handovers in nursing practice.

Patients in a hospital and/or healthcare facilities have to be cared for all day and all night, everyday of the week by nurses. The usual way to fulfill this need is to divide up the day into three 8-hour shifts. Different shifts have been put into place to help improve nurse satisfaction, decrease the nursing shortage and save the hospital money. The 24-hour day is made up of two 12-hour shifts; 12 hours in the day and 12 hours at night. There has been quite an ongoing debate over the years regarding this issue of nurses working over 8 hours in a single day. Many people, such as hospital nursing administrators, have reason to believe that working long hour shifts causes more errors in

Hourly rounding contributes in several key areas to achievement of high levels of patient satisfaction, including quality of care and patient safety. This puts patients at the center of care by building on the fundamental aspects of care, which are so important. Thus by checking in on patients in wards regularly to see whether they are comfortable and have everything they need can produce a number of positive results. Nurses

Very interesting post, you may some great point. But as nurse we know how important ambulating as soon as possible post-op. According Bare, Cheever, Hinkle & Smeltzer, early ambulation has significant effect on recovery and the prevention of complications, such as, atelectasis, pneumonia, and or circulatory problems. In addition, ambulation can also help decrease pain and shorten the hospital stay. As the RN, How would you effectively help the patient manage is pain effectively and apply the necessary intervention needed to prevent any post-op complication. You mention in the post that you will consider the patient culture, should the patient be involved in the care and how would that affect the patient outcome you have set forth for the

By focusing on overall patient care and satisfaction many areas patients are surveyed on can be improved. Once a performance standard is selected staff must develop a plan for improvement. The first step would be to research as many sources as possible to find the best evidence based practices that would work for the specific facility. This can be divided into two the two categories of direct nursing care and indirect nursing care. Direct nursing care would include implementing hourly rounding, adequate nursing staff and SBAR communication. Indirect nursing care includes availability of technology such as wireless communication, real time locating, wireless monitoring, and electronic medical records. The second step would contain education of the staff on what is to be implemented and why. The why is important for nurses to overcome any barriers that might be encountered. While nursing practice has grown based on evidence Vanhook (2009) explains the greatest barriers to evidence based practice, such as difficulty interpreting findings, limited time, and misunderstanding of research itself, and how to overcome these barriers. With phase one and two completed facilities can move forward with implementation and evaluation.