Using Patient Whiteboards to Engage Families in Harm Prevention and Care Planning: A Quality Improvement Study.

Objectives: Whiteboards are a valuable tool used to facilitate communication between families and the care team, but they were underused in our institution. Our aim was to increase families' knowledge of their child's plan of care, safety plan, and medical care team names by increasing the use of patient whiteboards with inpatient populations at a freestanding quaternary care children's hospital.

Methods: With this quality improvement study, we redesigned the whiteboard template to address the following 4 main barriers to use: (1) not having enough space to explain concepts to families, (2) having too much information to complete, (3) unclear roles of who completes the whiteboard, and (4) forgetting to update the whiteboard.