Continuity of Care vs. Nurse to nurse Report!

Where I work, the charge nurses from day and night shift sit down together 20 minutes before the beginning of the next shift and work out the upcoming shift's assignments together. The list of nurses coming on shift is present, they know who worked the day before and would want their patients back.
They manage to work appropriate assignments for new grads, floaters and nurses on orientation.
At 0700, the charge nurse gives us a brief listing of patients, gives nurses their assignments, and we are ready to begin. Charge nurses here do not have an assignment.

I guess I am confused by your post. It seems like the main point is you want to keep the same patients. You started out saying you don't want nurse to nurse report because you can not have continuity of care, ( I am not sure what one has to do with the other)but then you say it is ok as long as you get the same patients. I do not think nurse to nurse report is the problem.

my unit...which is a med/surge tele..and I float down the hall to tele does things this way...and it seems to work well!

We recently switched from scattered 8 and 12 hour shifts to strictly 12 hour shifts (yes, we lost a lot of great nurses that had been there forever...that was a very bad thing, but I love the continuity of 12's!). The charge nurses try very hard to keep oncomming nurses with the same patient's as before to keep the continunity...but some days it just isn't possible with the influx of new admits...but they do a great job of it for the most part...

We tape report, and oncoming shift comes in 30 minutes before shift and listens to report. We stay until we have spoken to each nurse we are handing care to to make sure there are no updates and questions. So a bit of nurse to nurse if necessary (sometimes if it is the same two nurses over time, we know the patient well enough a long formal report is not necessary...just the changes in a patient we know well is suffient and saves time).

I wait till they open the kardex and check the MAR's for the patients so in case I forgot to sign something or there is a question that might be remembered by seeing the MAR (those constant "oh yeah..." moments...LOL!).

The trick to this is making sure you not only manage your patient care well...but get that charting done effectively and throughout the day, and complete your charting and your shift tasks by shift end! I am able to do this easily because of my prior experience (worked ALF with 150 patients to one nurse, talk about lots of charting and tasks...but I learned to write fast, just the facts, and don't write the same things on my nursing notes that I have charted elsewhere...no need to write copies of things...and boy did that save time!!!).

I like this style of report...

However, we are going computerized soon...not sure what type of reporting that will result in at this point...but I am sure I will make the best of it...

Hmmm... on the unit that I work, we really don't do it either way. Basically, the charge nurse comes in and assigns everyone to a certain part of the hall. So I might have rooms 1 and 2 (semi private rooms, so I have four patients), Suzy has rooms 3 and 4, Jane has rooms 5-8, and so on. If I work all weekend, I will probably have rooms 1 and 2 all weekend, but if patients get discharged out of those rooms and don't get readmitted, then I might have patients in rooms 1, 2, and 3, just to make the assigments fair.

So, in a three day stretch I will BASICALLY have the same group of patients but my group may change a bit. Doesn't really bother me too much. Making assignments fairly and in a way that makes everyone happy must be so frustrating. I'm glad I'm not a charge nurse!