Morning report decreases length of stay in emergency general surgery patients

Abstract

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.