Patient White Boards - Recommendations?

[5678kma]

Hey team!

My unit is planning to upgrade the care team communication boards in our patient rooms.

• What components would you want on your patient's whiteboard?
  
• How would you want it organized?
  

For example, date, surgeon, RN: [space for name], PCA: [Name], other provider: [Name], oxygen needs, activity assist requirements, plan for the day, area for family questions/communication, etc

I work on a cardiovascular surgery/heart and lung transplant PCU so the board needs to be somewhat broad to be applicable to all patients.

Thanks for your consideration!

[Charge200J, BSN]

Ours is for a Cardiac ICU so it may be slightly different from yours. But ours starts with having a spot for the date/day of the week. As well as the pt's room number and a small sun/rain clouds/snow that you can circle to orient the pt to day/night time & weather. There's a large space for plan of care. The bottom part has a spot for names of the RN, Respiratory, and tech. Then my favorite part is "family contact info." It's really nice to have the POA's contact info right there on the board when you really need it quickly. Lastly it has boxes you can check for mobility goals, daily awakening/breathing trials, diet, pain meds (what type and when it's next available), etc. My biggest suggestion is keep it simple...the easier it is for the nurse/tech to fill out the more likely it will actually get used. We've found that the #1 barrier to people updating the white boards is that we couldn't find a pen! So consider attaching a white board marker to each board.

[smf0903]

Ours has patient name, date, primary doctor, consult doctors, case management, room number/phone number, RN/aide, pain scale, acceptable pain level, time pain med given/next due, discharge plan, and big area to write things such as weights or pertinent info. It's simple and we use the same through the entire facility.

And ours has a little flip-down thing that houses dry erase marker and eraser.

[CCU BSN RN]

Ours has way too much stuff. Its a large white board about 10 feet from the patient's face. It has maybe 10 fields to be filled in, including

Date, RN, CNA, MD, Housekeeper, Case Manager, patient's preferred name, and I must be forgetting an 8th thing because it's 2 columns of 4.

Anyway, by the time I fill in all of those fields, it's nearly impossible to write big enough for the majority of my patients to see, even with glasses on.

If I could do it over I'd do:

1. Patient Name or what they like to be called

2. Date

3. RN

5. CNA

6. Doctor or PA/NP covering the patient at that time.

and I'd do it on some pretty darn big whiteboards.

As a pipe dream, pain med due dates, a few goals for the day are wonderful, but not all patients bug me about when their meds are due, and they're often so anxious or doped up or in pain or can't breathe that I try to avoid goals in the immediate postop period. I tell the patient what to do, and if he wants to know why, I'm happy to tell him. I don't think there's merit in the surgeon's name on the board, because 1. if your patient let this surgeon operate on him/her, they better know that person's name and 2. they're going to see him for like, 5 minutes a day, tops, postop, unless they're dying. Family members see the surgeon's name and demand to speak with him, but cross-covering MDs or PA/NPs on a service rotate frequently, so I feel there's merit in their names up there.

[MunoRN, RN]

Keep...it...simple. Too much info and it becomes useless as a way to keep patient's up to speed on basic information.

I would also avoid putting POA/family contact info on the board all together, too often this information is put on the white board and then the patient moves to a room down the hall and now we've lost what turned out to be the only record of contact information. I've seen a situation where a patient was actively dying and we couldn't let family know because it had only been written on a white board, a white board in a room the patient was no longer in.