Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Aug 17, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Aug 17, 2019 - Aug 26, 2019
Date Accepted: Nov 26, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
An e-Delphi study protocol to develop an evidence-based nursing handover standard for a multi-site public hospital in Switzerland
ABSTRACT
Background:
Inadequate or non-existent clinical handovers, or failures to transfer information, responsibility, and accountability can have extremely serious consequences for hospitalized patients.
Objective:
To build a consensus, evidence-based, nursing handover standard for inpatients during shift changes or internal transfers between hospital wards and based on the papers by Slade et al. (2014, 2016).
Methods:
This protocol describes a mixed-methods design using a modified Delphi data-collection survey and involving a targeted panel sample of about 300 nurse experts. A multi-round survey will select this quasi-anonymized panel from a multi-site public hospital in Switzerland. Each survey stage will be described and will build on the previous one. The study will end with a cognitive debriefing involving a focus group discussion with a randomly selected panel deciding on which items should and should not be accepted for the evidence-based clinical nursing handover standard. An item must achieve a consensus of ≥ 70% for inclusion.
Results:
The present study’s expected outcome is a consensus-built, evidence-based nursing handover standard for inpatients during shift changes or internal transfers between the wards of a multi-site public hospital in Switzerland. The first round’s expected outcomes will be the selection of numerous items about which the panel was in agreement and a list of items about which it could not find a consensus. The second round’s expected outcomes will be a final selection of the items about which the panel was in agreement and a list of items about which no agreement could be found (i.e., topics rejected for inclusion in the handover standard). The third round of the e-Delphi process will be a cognitive debriefing involving a focus group discussing the consensus/non-consensus items in the nursing shift handover and patient transfer standard.
Conclusions:
This survey will enable us to develop an evidence-based nursing handover standard for use during shift changes and internal inpatient transfers in a multi-site public hospital in Switzerland. Clinical Trial: not applicable
Citation
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Copyright
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