Strategies to Improve Patient Transition from OR to Recovery

In December 2017, Drs. Catalina Casas Lopez, Deepti Vissa, and Ian Herrick represented the cardiac team at the IHI National Forum on Quality Improvement in Orlando, Florida, and presented two posters on work being done at LHSC to improve the perioperative patient handover process.

Dr. Casas Lopez’s presentation, titled “Improving the transition of care for postoperative cardiac surgical patients—making the handover better,” covers an evaluation of LHSC current practice. Her report aims to improve quality and safety of transitioning patients from the OR into recovery with a strategy to increase results on a handover scoring system. This critical period should be timely and efficient (by not lasting longer than 3-4 minutes and eliminating redundancy among personnel).

Dr. Vissa, who is completing a Fellowship in Quality Control through our department, presented “Perioperative Handover—Talking to each other (better),” which summarizes the findings of a study conducted on the communication practices between anesthesiologists and the Post Anesthesia Care Unit (PACU) nurses at 3 hospitals throughout 1 year. Quality of communication was measured using the SBAR (Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation) tool. After one-on-one meetings with site leaders and PACU nurse educators, as well as group sessions with PACU nurses, there is now a city-wide commitment from our unit to improve communication practices in the OR.

The Intitute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is an international organization with a mission to “improve health and healthcare worldwide.” Learn more about The IHI