HOURLY ROUNDING AND PATIENT SAFETY

Hourly Rounding and Patient Safety

Hourly Rounding and Patient Safety

Introduction

Hourly rounds of nurses are very important for quality care and the safety of patient. However, hourly visits often are perceived as troublesome, time consuming, or unrelated to the actual care of the client. This paper was originally conceived to alleviate some of the problems involved in writing hourly visits that deal with psychiatric problems. Many nurses felt that they had to “reinvent the wheel” each time they sat down to make an hourly visit for a client whose behavior was, in fact, similar to the behavior of other clients in their experience, although they recognized differences among individual clients and their needs. This paper was first written to be a source for writing hourly visits, to allow nurses to choose the parts of a comprehensive hourly visit that are appropriate to the needs of a unique person and to adapt and specify those parts according to that person's needs. This paper can be seen as a catalog of possibilities for the care of psychiatric clients, with suggestions of nursing diagnoses, assessment data, expected outcomes, and interventions. (We do not mean to suggest, however, that all possibilities are contained in this paper.) It is also meant to be a catalyst for thought about nursing care, a starting point in planning care for the client, and a structure for using the nursing process to efficiently address the client's needs. This paper discusses hourly rounding of nurses and patient safety.

Significance Of The Problem

The rationale of this paper is to find out the outcomes of hourly rounding on call light usage, fall rates, and satisfaction of patients.

Review of the Research Literature

Although the idea of hourly rounding is not very new, it is going through revival in many hospitals all over the USA. Nurses usually practice rounded on the hospital patients during the mid of 20th century. As nursing staff deficiency got more and more, hourly rounding took place less regularly.

Hourly Rounding and Patient Safety is also emphasised by the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN). QSEN was a funded project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) for three phases so far. The general objective during every stage of QSEN is to deal with the issue of making future nurses with the attitudes, knowledge and skills essential to incessantly progress the safety and quality of the healthcare organizations in which they perform. Hourly rounding is the key to patient safety as rounding helps nurses to:

provide a focus for using the nursing process in a deliberate manner with each client.

provide the basis for evaluating the effectiveness of nursing interventions and allow revisions based on documented plans of care, not unspecified or haphazard nursing interventions.

are the only feasible means of effective communication about client care among different members of the nursing staff, who work at different times and who may not be familiar with the client (eg, float, registry, or part-time nurses).

provide a central point of information for coordination of ...