Transfers from intensive care unit to hospital ward: a multicentre textual analysis of physician progress notes

Little is known about documentation during transitions of patient care between clinical specialties. Therefore, we examined the focus, structure and purpose of physician progress notes for patients transferred from the intensive care unit (ICU) to hospital ward to identify opportunities to improve c...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Critical care (London, England) England), 2018-01, Vol.22 (1), p.19-19, Article 19
Main Authors: Brown, Kyla N, Leigh, Jeanna Parsons, Kamran, Hasham, Bagshaw, Sean M, Fowler, Rob A, Dodek, Peter M, Turgeon, Alexis F, Forster, Alan J, Lamontagne, Francois, Soo, Andrea, Stelfox, Henry T
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Canada
Care and treatment
Cohort Studies
Communication
Continuity of Patient Care - standards
Documentation
Documentation - methods
Documentation - standards
Hospital ward
Hospitals
Humans
Intensive care unit
Intensive care units
Intensive Care Units - organization & administration
Management
Medical Records
Patient transfer
Patient Transfer - methods
Patients
Patients' Rooms - organization & administration
Physicians
Physicians - psychology
Physicians - standards
Practice
Progress notes
Prospective Studies
Provider communication
Qualitative Research
Research Report - standards
Workforce
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Little is known about documentation during transitions of patient care between clinical specialties. Therefore, we examined the focus, structure and purpose of physician progress notes for patients transferred from the intensive care unit (ICU) to hospital ward to identify opportunities to improve communication breaks. This was a prospective cohort study in ten Canadian hospitals. We analyzed physician progress notes for consenting adult patients transferred from a medical-surgical ICU to hospital ward. The number, length, legibility and content of notes was counted and compared across care settings using mixed-effects linear regression models accounting for clustering within hospitals. Qualitative content analyses were conducted on a stratified random sample of 32 patients. A total of 447 patient medical records that included 7052 progress notes (mean 2.1 notes/patient/day 95% CI 1.9-2.3) were analyzed. Notes written by the ICU team were significantly longer than notes written by the ward team (mean lines of text 21 vs. 15, p 
ISSN:1364-8535
1466-609X
1364-8535
DOI:10.1186/s13054-018-1941-0