A 82-year-old lady is admitted to a tertiary care hospital with a fever and shortness of breath. The patient has had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the past. The admitting physician diagnoses her with pneumonia and begins her on empiric antibiotic treatment overnight. The patient's health worsens after several days of therapy, and she is moved to the critical care unit. On admission, sputum cultures were taken, but the findings were not examined by the daytime staff, causing a delay in commencing more precise antibiotic therapy. Which of the following interventions is most likely to avoid this sort of medical error?

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Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Eductional Objective: Multiple clinicians will assume responsibility for a patient's care at different times of the day in a hospital environment, which might result in care discontinuity. As a result, when clinicians do not communicate effectively throughout transitions, patients are more likely to have negative outcomes. A patient handoff is the act of transferring responsibility for medical care, with "sign-out" referring to the process of delivering information about the patient and essential follow-up treatment. In a variety of hospital settings, oversights and communication breakdowns during the sign-out and handoff procedure have been connected to bad occurrences. Medication mistakes, needless escalations in treatment (e.g., transfer to the critical care unit), redundancies in care, and delays can all occur from the omission of essential information during handoffs.  Standardized handoffs that include specified key elements (eg, a systematic procedure for sign-out, checklists of tasks that need to be completed) have been shown to significantly reduce preventable adverse events

A 82-Year-Old Lady Is Admitted to a Tertiary Care Hospital