Paging the Right Resident the First Time on General Internal Medicine: A Quality Improvement Project

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Quality Improvement
• Hospital Communication Systems
• Internal Medicine

Background:

• Interprofessional hospital communication is essential for patient care quality.
• Nursing pages are frequently misdirected to residents, causing delays and safety concerns.
• A quality improvement project aimed to reduce paging errors to general internal medicine (GIM) teams.

Purpose of the Study:

• To decrease day shift pages to GIM teams by 25% within 10 months.
• To improve the accuracy of resident paging by nurses.
• To enhance overall hospital communication efficiency and patient safety.

Main Methods:

• A quality improvement project utilizing the Model for Improvement framework.
• Implementation of changes including digital resident assignment displays and redirected switchboard pages.
• Evaluation through statistical process control charts and qualitative feedback over 39 weeks.

Main Results:

• Average pages/team/week decreased by 38.3% (from 133 to 82) post-implementation.
• Nurse awareness of correct resident assignments increased from 0% to 38.1%.
• Resident receipt of pages for other patients' issues decreased from 50.0% to 26.7%.

Conclusions:

• Quality improvement initiatives effectively streamlined the hospital paging process.
• The project successfully reduced paging errors and improved communication efficiency for GIM teams.
• Enhanced communication contributes to better patient care and reduced safety risks.