Barriers to Quality Communication Between Interdepartmental Nurses During Patient Handoff and Their Elimination: Integrative Literature Review Proposal

Abstract

Medication errors are an issue in all medical providers try to avoid at all cost. Nurses especially are at high risk for medication errors because they are responsible for patient hand-offs at the beginning and end of each shift. As a nurse during hand-off you must gather all pertinent information about each of your patients while also preform regular responsibilities of a nurse. Barriers to quality communication between nurses during hand-off are a key issue and are to blame for many errors occurring by nurses. This papers goal is to address these barriers to quality communication and discuss strategies nurses can implement during hand-off to assure medical errors do not take place by using an adjusted version of Neuman’s Systems model.

Keywords: nurses, nursing, handoff, handover, change-of-shift, interdepartmental, errors, medication errors, safety, patient safety, communication, barriers, and end of shift