Formalizing The Prehospital to In-Hospital Handoff
I’ve written quite a bit about the benefits and pitfalls of the handoff process. Handoffs involving critical trauma patients is particularly important, because the receiving team needs to know a lot of information about what happened before patient arrival. All too often, the patient gets moved to the bed, and the medics are pushed to the side as the team descends upon him.
A number of hospitals around the US and the world have come up with solutions to strengthen this process. The regional trauma advisory committee here in the Twin Cities codified and implemented a formal handoff process to be used by emergency medical services providers any time they deliver a trauma activation patient to one of the area trauma centers.
I’d like to share our solution with you. This 4 minute video describes and demonstrates the process. Our expectation is that once things really get going, EMS will want to do this with just about every patient they deliver to the hospital.
Have a look, and feel free to comment or describe what you do!
Here’s a link to a Word document with the contents of the poster that can be placed in your trauma bay. Feel free to add your logos or change it in any way you wish. Download the poster here.
I first started writing about this project over a year ago. See these related posts on how it progressed:
- The handoff: opportunity for improvement
- Paramedic comments on handoffs
- The handoff: proposal for a solution
