Optimizing Nurses' Time: Reducing Assessment Frequency in General Care.

Area of Science:

• Nursing Practice
• Quality Improvement
• Patient Safety

Background:

• Nurses are a limited hospital resource, with traditional twice-daily head-to-toe assessments lacking evidence for their necessity.
• Mayo Clinic investigated the benefit of reducing assessment frequency in a general care setting.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine if decreasing comprehensive physical assessments from twice daily to once daily impacts patient safety or care quality.
• To assess nursing staff satisfaction with the change in assessment frequency.

Main Methods:

• A quality improvement project compared once-daily versus twice-daily head-to-toe assessments for adult general medical patients.
• Data collected included patient safety events, code blue events, rapid response team calls, length of stay, and compliance with other required assessments.

Main Results:

• No significant increases in adverse patient safety events or hospital length of stay were observed.
• Compliance with other required assessments remained stable, with a temporary dip in pressure injury assessments that returned to baseline.
• Nursing staff compliance was high (80%), with 96% positive feedback favoring the continuation of once-daily assessments.

Conclusions:

• Reducing head-to-toe assessment frequency to once daily appears safe for adult general medical patients.
• Further research is needed to validate these findings in other patient populations and healthcare settings.