Campus Location

Dallas Campus (Online)

Date of Award

6-2019

Document Type

DNP Project

Department

Nursing

Degree Name

Doctor of Nursing Practice

Committee Chair or Primary Advisor

Dr. Tonya McGee

Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor

Dr. Faisal Aboul-Einen

Third Committee Member or Committee Reader

Dr. Catherine Garner

Abstract

Inadequate or incorrect communication during transfer from skilled nursing facilities leads to misunderstandings about patient care needs, jeopardizes patients’ trust in the health care system, and leads to poor clinical outcomes. Due to gaps in communication from one health care setting to another, it was essential to determine if a patient-centered discharge tool would improve patients’ perception of continuity of care. The purpose of the study was to implement a patient-centered tool that would help improve the information needed at the time of discharge from a skilled nursing facility. Roy’s Adaptation Model supports the relevance of effective communication in the patient handoff process in a qualitative research methodology. Through phone interviews with 137 discharged patients, I asked all questions from the Perception of Continuity Tool developed by Chao to determine patients’ perception of continuity of care. If patients chose to stop the interview at any point, the information collected as classified was invalid. The findings of the study revealed that while the patient-centered communication tool appeared to improve patients’ perception of continuity of care, a statistically significant difference was not determined. This research is vital to implementing a better discharge communication tool to address reductions in medication errors, potentially improving patients’ perception of continuity of care and increasing the trust in health care. Further research with a larger sample size is needed to determine if a patient-centered communication tool can improve the perception of continuity of care.

Keywords: patient, health care facility, patient transfer, discharge continuity of care

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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