SHARED maternity care: enhancing clinical communication in a private maternity hospital setting

Abstract

Midwives and visiting medical officers have a unique relationship within private hospital maternity settings. The effective exchange of accurate information between them is a fundamental element of patient safety and is vital to the success of the clinical handover process. The SHARED (situation, history, assessment, risk, expectation, documentation) project developed, implemented and evaluated a framework and support tools for improving clinical handover in two private maternity hospitals. The project included a pre‐ and post‐study design using clinician surveys, chart audits, patient satisfaction surveys and a review of clinical incident data. A standardised approach to handover, using the SHARED framework with a standardised minimum dataset, improves the accuracy and appropriateness of information.

Clinical handover: critical communications

“…A standardised approach to handover can help clarify the purpose and content of handovers and reduce confusion. Such an approach needs to be easy to use so it can be easily taught and recalled, as demonstrated by https://doi.org/10.5694/j.1326-5377.2009.tb02624.x in a study of enhancing clinical communication in a private maternity hospital 12 . This point is also made in the article by https://doi.org/10.5694/j.1326-5377.2009.tb02622.x on standardised clinical handover tools, 13 in which clinicians were informed of the dangers of poor handover.…”

Developing a framework for nursing handover in the emergency department: an individualised and systematic approach

“…); SBAR (Velji et al . ); SHARED (Hatten‐Masterson & Griffiths ); VITAL and PVITAL (Wilson ) (See Table ). Most of these tools have been designed for use on inpatient wards.…”

Cognitive Informatics for Biomedicine

“…Face-to-face communication offers a richer communication experience, providing paralinguistic and nonverbal information in addition to the words themselves, and likely offers the best quality and spectrum of communication (Kraut et al 1988;Orlikowski and Hofman 1997;Hatten-Masterson and Griffiths 2009;Xiao et al 2001). Furthermore, colocation of healthcare work permits indirect and informal communication (Vuckovic et al 2004), enhancing situational awareness among members of the group in a manner similar to more formalized coordination mechanisms such as "voice loops" (Patterson et al 1999).…”