Nurses spend twice the amount of time chasing other people to get answers as they do locating other resources – wasting as much as two hours a shift. That’s one of the findings of a Cisco survey of nurses on the impact of communications on their ability to do their job.
Cisco’s survey also found that about 60% of nurses in the study estimate that they work up to 10 hours of overtime each week due to time wasted or lost trying to communicate with staff.
Cisco’s survey was conducted by Zogby International. It queried more than 250 practicing nurses over a two month period, and Cisco announced its findings this week at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in Chicago.
The survey also found that 48% of nurses said “care team availability and location” is most needed from a communications device at the point of care. Fifty-six percent said that better communication between staff is the most significant challenge that a nurse’s communications device could address.
The surveyed nurses noted a direct correlation between the ability to effectively communicate with the rest of the care team and the quality of patient care. When asked to what extent communication lapses impact patient safety, 92% noted a “medium to very high” impact. Another 19% of nurses said they could more easily avoid patient care errors with the right communications device.
Thirty percent said they could provide more timely patient care if they had access to a common communications device; and 74% said improved communication would have a “high” potential impact on the patient experience.
Ninety-one percent of the nurses surveyed said they would like to use a single communications device for care team communications, but 49% reported actually using a single device. Twenty-seven percent said they used two or more devices during a typical shift, while 25% reported having no access to a mobile communications device.
When asked about the impact of communication lapses on the quality of their work life, 74% of nurses survey identified a high negative impact, according to the Cisco survey.
Not surprisingly, Cisco said it is developing some clinical care products to address these needs. Cisco Nurse Connect integrates nurse call applications with Cisco Unified Wireless IP 7925G Phones to deliver nurse call alerts to mobile caregivers.
The system is designed to access nurses on their mobile devices so they don’t have to continually walk back to nursing stations or patient rooms. Nurses can also have two-way communications with patients and send requests to different levels of personnel after talking with the patient, Cisco says.
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