Effectiveness of evaluative feedback on the performance of head nurses in shift reporting

Abstract

Background: Accurate reporting is essential to protect patients from fragmented and hazardous care, and written shift reporting is an vital part of reporting process, audit is widely used to measure performance and can be fed back to improve performance.

Aim : This study investigated the effectiveness of evaluative feedback on the performance of head nurses in shift report.

Subject& Methods: 38 head nurses were included in the study; the study was carried out at Ain-Shams University Hospital, Cairo, Egypt.

Data collection: Included an audit checklist of the written shift report based on literature review. It was intended to evaluate the quality of reporting of patient care, through reviewing the items of shift report, its contents, and criteria of written shift report as documented by the head nurse.

Results: none of the head nurses performance had adequate total audit at the pre-intervention phase. However, this increased to reach 100.0% at the post-intervention phase (p<0.001). At the follow-up phase, it decreased to 81.6%, with significantly higher than the pre-intervention phase level (p<0.001).

Conclusion: Using evaluative feedback intervention with guidelines can improve the related performance of head nurses. Despite a slight decline at three-month follow-up, the improvement continues to be better compared to baseline.

Recommendations: Using audit combined with evaluative feedback in various areas of care to inform quality improvement initiatives. Hospital administration supports in addition to effective and continuous supervision are needed to avoid follow-up declines.