The patient handoff: a comprehensive curricular blueprint for resident education to improve continuity of care. Acad Med 2012 Apr;87(4):411-8
Date
03/01/2012Pubmed ID
22361791Pubmed Central ID
PMC3409830DOI
10.1097/ACM.0b013e318248e766Abstract
In 2010, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education released its resident duty hours restrictions, requiring that faculty monitor their residents' patient handoffs to ensure that residents are competent in handoff communications. Although studies have reported the need to improve the effectiveness of the handoff and a variety of curricula have been suggested and implemented, a common method for teaching and evaluating handoff skills has not been developed. Also in 2010, engineers, informaticians, and physicians interested in patient handoffs attended a symposium in Savannah, Georgia, hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery, entitled Handovers and Handoffs: Collaborating in Turns. As a result of this symposium, a workgroup formed to develop practical and readily implementable educational materials for medical educators involved in teaching patient handoffs to residents. In this article, the result of that yearlong collaboration, the authors aim to provide clarity on the definition of the patient handoff, to review the barriers to performing effective handoffs in academic health centers, to identify available solutions to improve handoffs, and to provide a structured approach to educating residents on handoffs via a curricular blueprint. The authors' blueprint was developed to guide educators in customizing handoff education programs to fit their specific, local needs. Hopefully, it also will provide a starting point for future research into improving the patient handoff. Increasingly complex patient care environments require both innovations in handoff education and improvements in patient care systems to improve continuity of care.
Author List
Wohlauer MV, Arora VM, Horwitz LI, Bass EJ, Mahar SE, Philibert I, Handoff Education and Assessment for Residents (HEAR) Computer Supported Cooperative WorkgroupMESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold
Clinical CompetenceCommunication
Continuity of Patient Care
Curriculum
Electronic Health Records
Humans
Internship and Residency
Patient Transfer
Quality Improvement
United States