Hand me an isobar method of clinical handover and level of safe nursing practice among nurses working in icu

Aim of the study: To assess the effectiveness of HAND ME AN ISOBAR Technique of clinical handover on level of safe nursing practice during shift to shift hand over among ICU nurses. Background: Nurses are in the first place in the direct care of the patients. Patients spend most of their time with nurses during their hospital stay, especially in intensive care units. An effective inter-shift information communication is necessary to maintain care continuity and improve quality care. The proper standardized method of medical hand over will provide good quality care to the patients without missing patient information to the other shift staffs. Unfortunately nurses are not trained to use standardized handover technique in our country. Design: True experimental pre-test – post-test design. Methods: Probability sampling technique - Simple random sampling using lottery method was used. A total of 60 nurses participated in the study. Nurse safe practice Evaluation Checklist was used to assess the safe nursing practice for data collection. Result: The pre-test means score of safe nursing practice was 6.63±1.40 and the post test mean score was 19.17±1.08 among experimental group. The mean effective score was 12.53±1.59. The calculated paired ‘t’ value is 43.130 was found to be statistically significant at p<0.001 level. Conclusion: This study indicates that the HAND ME AN ISOBAR Technique of shift handover is an effective technique in improving the safe nursing practice. The standardized shift to shift handover technique will improve the safe nursing practice.