I work on a postpartum unit where we do couplet care from 7 am until 11 pm. At night however, the nursery opens and the nurses there get a patient ration of 6:1 and the nurses on the postpartum unit do likewise. At 7am we go back to couplet care. What we have been doing is that the mom's nurses tape report for the oncoming shift then the nursery nurses come in and give the oncoming nurses report on the babies. Because the nurses on postpartum at night will have to give report to several different nurses on daylight because their assignment needs to be broken up, we have found that the taped report does the trick. All oncoming nurses then listen to the tape at one time and are done in a relatively short time.
We just got a new manager. She wants us to begin doing bedside report. The problem with that as we see it is that many patients have social issues which can not be mentioned at the bedside. If we chose to give a cut and dry report minus the social issues at the bedside then we'd still have to come out of the room and finish the rest of the report in the hall. Now imagine this happening where the night shift offgoing nurse has to report off to 2 or 3 separate nurses and then the baby nurse has to repeat these same steps to report on the babies.
Another problem we see in this approach to reporting off is that, depending on the time, some of these patients are trying to sleep after a day of visitors, fussy baby, etc. It seems like this kind of reporting will take a whole lot longer and could potentially cause frustrations in our patients. The part about this taking a lot more time is important because this new manager is adamant about people leaving on time.
Are any of you doing this at your hospital? If so, what makes it work or not work, in your opinion?
