6023 Paediatric Handover Every Minute Counts

Objectives It is increasingly noted that daily morning, afternoon and night handovers start late, include discussions about patients not being cared for by those teams and drag on for an unnecessary amount of time. Handovers should be quick and concise ensuring only relevant information is shared. Handovers that start and finish late lead to long patient waiting time, delay to discharge, incomplete clinical jobs and often doctors working over time. Ultimately this causes patients, teams and families to suffer! Aim By September 2023 All Paediatric and SCBU teams attending morning handover should have all the information they require to start clinical duties at 9am on Monday to Friday. Methods I used observational tools, high level process map and fishbone diagrams to understand my problem in more detail allowing me to create my measures: Measure: Start time of morning handover and finish time of morning handover. Inclusions: Monday-Friday morning handover Exclusions: Saturday and Sunday, afternoon and evening handovers, clinical emergencies taking priority over handover. I created change ideas and than ran repeated PDSA cycles. Sampling method and frequency; daily sampling, run chart. Results I collected my results on a daily sampling method and plotted these into a run chart It was easy to see when a change had been made and whether this was a positive change. I was then able to repeat the sampling and continue to review the changes. I have attached my run chart which shows a clear improvement in handover time at each PDSA cycle. Conclusion If handover starts on time, more often than not handover will finish on time. After conducting my first 2 PDSA series my results suggest: Handover time reduced on average by 5.5minutes. This would mean 6.5 minute per person per handover saved (approx 8 people per handover) There are 3 handovers per day, 5 times per week. This would be a total 780 minutes (13 hours) that could be saved as a team per week. Imagine what could be achieved in this time!!