A Change in Nursing Hadover Location

Change of Nursing Handover Location

Kenneth Ikoo

Multimedia University of Kenya

INTRODUCTION

Patients require advance care in the ward rooms, this therefore requires that the nurses have to be available to attend to them. Nurses have the sole responsibility of attending to the patients need. Professionalism and up to standard practices are therefore required among the nurses in an attempt to achieve the patients’ needs. The health care sectors have elaborate procedures that provides the guidelines in patient’s service delivery (Smeulers et al., 2014). In most instances nurses have to change shifts or even duties in the health care facilities (Johnson et al., 2013). It is therefore noticed that patients have to come under the care of different health care experts. A nursing handover is daily routine in the health care premises.

Nursing handover is defined as the mechanism involved in the transfer of responsibility or accountability from one care provider or team provider that is the nurses to another (Tobiano, 2013). In clinical experience as a student’s nurse it is observed that traditional method that has been in existence is bedside handover. The bedside handover in involved a situation where the nurse during the shift had to pass all the information regarding the patients he or she was taking care of in the room where a very one around would hear them the patients However, this became acritical issue to me since it had various that were associated to it. Bedside handover allows to visually assess the patient and give patient opportunity to voice concerns.

The most touching issue was the patients’ confidential information being overhead by fellow patients. In this, it was evident that confidentiality of the patient and other social and ethical concerns would arise. This was against the Nursing and Midwifery Confidential (2008) code of professional conduct states that patient confidentiality must be maintained at all times. It was therefore decided to implement a service improvement by changing the changeover location that nurses can use to ensure that the patient’s medical diagnosis, prognosis and plan of action was kept confidential (Mikos, 2013). This is because substantial research have indicated that nursing handover have evolved and the need to modify the existing types is therefore undisputable for enabling the specific shift nurses to exchange vital medical information (Messam et al., 2009). In this handover procedure Nurses use handover time to discuss their own social lives, this creating further delays to length of time for patient handover In this regards, It is proposed that nursing handover at office, should be embraced as