A Brief Communication Curriculum Improves Resident and Nurse Communication Skills and Patient Satisfaction.

Background: Despite the ever-expanding role that the patient experience plays in healthcare, effective strategies proven to increase patient satisfaction ratings remain scarce. At the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, we identified patient-doctor and patient-nurse communication as an area for intervention to improve suboptimal patient satisfaction among medicine inpatients. We posited that the likely reasons for underperformance in this area were a lack of adequate training in bedside communication skills.

Health Literacy and Clear Bedside Communication: A Curricular Intervention for Internal Medicine Physicians and Medicine Nurses.

Introduction: Communication remains the backbone of patient-provider relationships, and many health outcomes have been directly attributed to both effective and ineffective communication. We developed an educational intervention to improve bedside communication and increase use of health literacy principles, in part as a response to suboptimal inpatient satisfaction scores.

Methods: Our intervention consisted of a beside communication curriculum among 37 attending medicine physicians, 76 internal medicine residents, and 85 bedside nurses.

Condition Help: A Patient- and Family-Initiated Rapid Response System.

Background: Rapid response teams (RRTs) help in delivering safe, timely care. Typically they are activated by clinicians using specific parameters. Allowing patients and families to activate RRTs is a novel intervention.

Good care, good science: leveraging frontline staff for quality.

Health care is changing by moving from volume-based care to quality-based care according to the US Department of Health and Human Services. Although hospitals have been required to report data and the results have been publically reported for some time, the frontline nurse was not aware of the impact of the federal government regulations and how this would refocus and re-center care that is provided. Nursing leaders need to provide the context for this culture shift and support the efforts of the frontline nurses by connecting the evidence of the quality indicators to quality care they provide.

Study of nurse workarounds in a hospital using bar code medication administration system.

This study analyzed registered nurse workarounds in an academic medical center using bar code medication administration technology. Nurse focus groups and a survey were used to determine the frequency and potential causes of workarounds. More than half of the nurses surveyed indicated that they administered medications without scanning the patient or medications during the last shift worked.