Research Article Open Access

Transitions of Care Handover Cards and Application in a Critical Care Medicine Fellowship Training Program

Abstract

Background: Poor communication amongst health-care providers is a common problem manifested in the critical care patient population. Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) training physician work-hour regulations have led to an increase in the number of daily patient handovers.

Objective: The ACGME has stressed the need for improved education and supervision of “transitions of care”. Methods: Our multidisciplinary critical care medicine fellowship program is one of the largest in the country. This pilot intervention was to create an easily adaptable tool into our daily ICU workflow for improving patient care, facilitating real-time directed Faculty feedback, and tracking compliance with new ACGME rules regarding supervised patient handovers.

Results: Our transitions of care cards are simple in design and easy to integrate in a typical academic clinical model. These cards have helped our trainees improve their patient handovers with requested Faculty directed feedback. The trainee is responsible for completion of the card and allows traceable compliance with ACGME rules for supervised patient handovers.

Conclusion: We created an innovative transition of care card as a powerful tool to help improve patient handovers. This simple tool also provides a novel format to comply with recent ACGME rules mandating supervised patient transitions of care.

Wessman B*

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