Clinical handover: Process improvement and reduction of handover time at Apollo Hospital

Abstract

Clinical nurses are one of the important pillars in the medical industry value chain and are present at the multiple critical touchpoints in the medical service delivery system. They oversee the delivery of patient care meeting local as well as international quality standards. However, these services are constraints with the available human, financial and material resources. Clinical nurses have different trainings and experience background. A hospital may be constraint with the number of nurses per patient due to financial constraints or with the changing requirement of nurses in various wards/departments. Matching nurses' training and education with the patient profiles and medical condition thus becomes a tedious job which are generally done by clinics nurse managers based on intuition and experience. This led to various issues of - accountability of services, retaining experienced nursing staff, balancing workload during shifts and offering learning environment for inexperienced nurses. There are various forms of team nursing that are adopted to provide safe patient care by using a diverse skill mix of experience. A team of clinical nurses with different experience and training skills are formed to take care of set of patients in the ward. Also, collaboration and teamwork among various nursing teams in different departments are crucial to producing better quality care and reducing risk to patients. This term paper explores on various ways of nurse allocation based on set of the defined parameters to provide optimum allocation between nurse and patients at the time of clinical handover. Though the study has evolved around Apollo hospital, this process is applicable to all the general wards of hospitals and clinics.