A Framework for Providers and Nurses: Standardizing Interdisciplinary Patient Rounds Further Improving Collaborative Communication

Background: When it comes to patient rounds, there continues to be a lack of team communication between medical providers and Registered Nurses. Nationally, only 30% of patient rounds take place with both medical providers and Registered Nurses present. This lack of interdisciplinary communication is linked to sentinel events, medical mishaps, and poor patient satisfaction. Unclear expectations of how and when medical providers and Registered Nurses should communicate about their patients has been identified as a contributing factor to insufficient collaborative communication. Methods: A quality improvement project was developed to help set clear expectations of how and when inpatient medical-surgical teams should communicate. Objective data on 2 team communication was gathered utilizing surveys. Staff perceptions and attitudes on collaborative communication was assessed using questionnaires. An educational presentation and framework was created and presented to medical providers and Registered Nurses. The educational presentation and framework detailed the benefits of collaborative communication and also explained how to conduct collaborative communication moving forward. Post-education and post-framework implementation benefits were evaluated by objective communication surveys as well as staff questionnaires. Results: There were 500 staff surveys collected in the evaluation of IPRs. These surveys indicated that face-to-face medical team communication decreased by 0.8% after the intervention. Despite face-to-face communication decreasing, overall collaborative communication increased by 4.8%. In addition to the staff surveys, there were 48 pre-intervention questionnaires and 36 post-intervention questionnaires utilized to evaluate staff perceptions surrounding IPRs. In these questionnaires, medical providers and Registered Nurses indicated significant improvements in understanding their role in collaborative communication- 23/48 participants pre-intervention to 31/36 participants post-intervention (p= 0.000006). Both medical providers and Registered Nurses also reported an increased preference for informal, non-face-to-face, collaborative communication- 19/48 participants pre-intervention to 22/36 post-intervention (p= 0.004). 3 Conclusion: The results indicate that the educational presentation and framework contributed to improving overall interdisciplinary communication. Continued research on methods to improve communication between medical providers and Registered nurses is needed to determine if similar results would be reproducible in other medical-surgical units.