Summary: Nurse-Patient Communication

As a leader, you are tasked with implementing new changes and leading your staff to accept and implement the changes. You must be able to present the idea, involve your staff in planning and trust them to come up with ideas to make the change happen. Leaders should motivate staff and know how to handle resistance (Huber, 2014). How you interpret change, whether you are accepting to it or refuting it, is how you will transpire that change in your staff. A leader needs to analyze themselves first and figure out how they process changes and what their leadership style is. Will you be the leader that sits back and just watches or will you dictate how the change will proceed? (Center for Creative Leadership, 2015). Patient safety is one

These scores are provided to nurse leaders so they can see how their department is scoring among patients. Nurse-patient communication is one of the areas patients get asked about. After implementing bedside report, a cardiothoracic unit, reported their nurse-patient communication score was at an 80% all because of bedside hand-off (Lindsay, 2015). Nurse leaders can develop an SBAR template for their department to use. Nurses report that with this tool there were less interruptions and less time spent on report (Cornell et al., 2013). The SBAR tool prompts the off-going nurse on what to report to the on-going nurse. This makes giving shift report more efficient. Once one department implements bedside report with an SBAR hand-off sheet all the other departments can benefit from this change as well. This can facilitate professionalism among interdisciplinary teams when transfer of patient care needs to occur. A cohesive bond is also formed between staff nurses who work different shifts.

Implementing the

There are several change theories that can be used. The nurse leader can guide her/his group to select which change theory to use. A popular one is Lewin’s change theory. Lewin’s theory differentiates the planned process from being seen as accidental or forced (Huber, 2014). There are three stages in Lewin’s change theory. Unfreezing is when the leader and unit committee create the motivation and get the staff ready for change. Interventions in this stage center on boosting involvement to change, stimulating communication about the status quo and the planned new change. Also, in the unfreezing stage the new change is presented as evidence-based. This shows the staff that this has been proven to deliver safe patient care (Nursing Theories, 2013). Moving, is the second phase, this is where the change actually occurs and the new behavior is learned in this stage. Leaders can also test the change in the moving stage. The leader will want to have nurses who will serve as go-to resource nurse. They will be on each shift to help with answers, the use of the SBAR tool and guide practice. The leader will collect feedback from the nursing staff and patients. The feedback will help to revise and review the new change. The last stage of Lewin’s is the refreezing stage. In this stage, the change is integrated and stabilized. Here the leader rewards the staff when the new change is applied. Staff