Faculty member review and feedback using a sign-out checklist: improving intern written sign-out

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.

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.

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.

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.