Abstract

PURPOSE
Although residents commonly perform patient care sign-out during training, faculty do not frequently supervise or evaluate sign-out. The authors designed a sign-out checklist, and they investigated whether use of the checklist, paired with faculty member review and feedback, would improve interns' written sign-out.
METHOD
In a randomized, controlled design in 2011, the authors compared the sign-out content and the overall sign-out summary scores of interns who received twice-monthly faculty member sign-out evaluation with those of interns who received the standard sign-out instruction. A sign-out checklist, which the authors developed on the basis of internal needs assessment and published sign-out recommendations, guided the evaluation of written sign-out content and sign-out organization as well as the twice-monthly, face-to-face evaluation that the interns in the intervention group received.
RESULTS
Using the sign-out checklist and receiving feedback from a faculty member led to statistically significant improvements in interns' sign-out. Through regression analysis, the authors calculated a 23% difference in the sign-out content (P = .005) and a 2.2-point difference in the overall summary score (on a 9-point scale, P = .009) between the interns who received sign-out feedback and those who did not. The content and quality of the intervention group's sign-outs improved, whereas the content and quality of the control group's worsened.
CONCLUSIONS
A sign-out checklist paired with twice-monthly, face-to-face feedback from a faculty member led to improvements in the content and quality of interns' written sign-out.

Links

Publisher Full Text

Authors

Bump GM, Bost JE, Buranosky R, Elnicki M

Institution

Department of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-2582, USA. bumpgm@upmc.edu

Source

Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges 87:8 2012 Aug pg 1125-31

MeSH

Checklist
Clinical Competence
Communication
Continuity of Patient Care
Curriculum
Education, Medical, Graduate
Educational Measurement
Faculty, Medical
Feedback
Female
Humans
Internal Medicine
Internship and Residency
Male
Quality of Health Care
Regression Analysis
Risk Management
Safety Management
Writing

Pub Type(s)

Journal Article
Randomized Controlled Trial

Language

eng

PubMed ID

22722359