No abstract

BackgroundModern acute care surgery (ACS) programs depend on consistent patient hand-offs to facilitate care, as most programs have transitioned to shift-based coverage. We sought to determine the impact of implementing a morning report (MR) model on patient outcomes in the trauma service of a tertiary care center.MethodsThe University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) Division of ACS implemented MR in October 2015, which consists of the trauma day team, the emergency general surgery day team, and a combined night float team. This study queried the UAMS Trauma Registry and the Arkansas Clinical Data Repository for all patients meeting the National Trauma Data Bank inclusion criteria from January 1, 2011 to April 30, 2018. Bivariate frequency statistics and generalized linear model were run using STATA V.14.2ResultsA total of 11 253 patients (pre-MR, n=6556; post-MR, n=4697) were analyzed in this study. The generalized linear model indicates that implementation of MR resulted in a significant decrease in length of stay (LOS) in trauma patients.DiscussionThis study describes an approach to improving patient outcomes in a trauma surgery service of a tertiary care center. The data show how an MR session can allow for patients to get out of the hospital faster; however, broader implications of these sessions have yet to be studied. Further work is needed to describe the decisions being made that allow for a decreased LOS, what dynamics exist between the attendings and the residents in these sessions, and if these sessions can show some of the same benefits in other surgical services.Level of evidenceLevel 4, Care Management.

Objective: Communication in the hospital setting is an easy target for quality improvement. Capturing this change via communication between providers during hand-offs is necessary to reduce delays and errors. While this process has been more widely characterized in medical specialties, we designed this study to address the knowledge gap in surgical specialties.Methods: Our institution’s division of Acute Care Surgery (ACS) implemented Morning Report (MR) in October of 2015. At MR, all admissions and service transfers were discussed from Trauma, Emergency General Surgery (EGS), and Surgical Critical Care services from the previous 24 hours. This study compared patients who underwent a surgical procedure during their hospital stay before and after protocol implementation.Results: 974 patients were included in this study. The average patient was 50.3 years of age, 65.4% were white, and 51.7% were male. The average length of stay (LOS) was 8.3 days with 1.75 days to procedure. The post-MR cohort LOS was 2.7 shorter and had 0.85 fewer days to procedure. In an adjusted regression analysis, days to procedure and LOS decreased by 33% (p < .01) and 17% (p < .01) respectively.Conclusions: Implementation of MR led to a decrease in the overall LOS and days to procedure for operative patients. Our results advocate for the standard use of structured hand-offs in surgical units.