Using Patient Whiteboards to Engage Families in Harm Prevention and Care Planning: A Quality Improvement Study

Whiteboards are a valuable tool used to facilitate communication between families and the care team, but they were underused in our institution. Our aim was to increase families' knowledge of their child's plan of care, safety plan, and medical care team names by increasing the use of patient whiteboards with inpatient populations at a freestanding quaternary care children's hospital.

With this quality improvement study, we redesigned the whiteboard template to address the following 4 main barriers to use: (1) not having enough space to explain concepts to families, (2) having too much information to complete, (3) unclear roles of who completes the whiteboard, and (4) forgetting to update the whiteboard. We focused the content of the new template on critical information the family needed to know, assigned roles to make it easy to know who filled out which section, and used plain language.

The use of each whiteboard section on the old templates (n = 92) versus new templates (n = 424) were compared. Use increased for all sections (plan of care [48.9% to 71.6%; P = .008], safety plan [4.3% to 22.8%; P ≤ .001], medical team [85.8% to 87.6%; P = .068], nurse's name [94.5% to 98.8%; P = .031]). After the template redesign, 85.8% of families knew the plan of care, 32.3% knew the safety plan, 61.5% knew the medical team's name, and 92.8% knew the nurse's name.

After the implementation of a new whiteboard template, we significantly increased the use of patient whiteboards and demonstrated improvement in families' knowledge of the plan of care with inpatient populations at a freestanding quaternary care children's hospital.