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One of the most important duties in any healthcare provider’s job is that of the patient handoff:  signing your patient off to someone else.  This may mean doc to doc, nurse to nurse, or–in the EMS context–from medic to nurse/doc/whoever.  It’s one of those terribly important parts of the job, and there are two halves to it:  the medic has to give the information, and the person taking report has to hear it and understand it (and potentially pass it off to someone else).  If you’ve ever wondered what actually happens, you’re certainly not alone.

Some folks at New York Hospital Queens did a study (disclaimer) to answer the question of whether docs were aware of prehospital meds and procedures.  They surveyed some docs regarding patients brought in by EMS.  Out of 171 completed surveys, the docs only had everything right a little over 1/5 of the time (21.6%).  Less than 10% of the time, the docs had no clue what had been done; in the remaining 71%, they were wrong.

Since I don’t have the survey instrument in front of me, I’ll never know whether there actually is some communication breakdown, and if so, on what end.  (Since these results came only from a single hospital, there’s no telling how useful they’d be anyhow.)  But it does make me wonder–what happens to that patient report the minute it leaves my mouth?

Filed under: EMS Research