Workflow Interruptions Threaten Patient Safety, Hospitalists’ Job Satisfaction

Another approach is to establish practices that may decrease interruptions. Interruptions likely are reduced by:

• Having unit-based hospitalist staffing;
• Holding multidisciplinary rounds;
• Training nurses to batch pages;
• Conducting structured evening and night rounds on all nursing units for non-urgent matters; and
• Developing paging “levels” so that a receiving physician knows if a call back is needed and, if so, if it is urgent or not.

In talking to hospitalists who cite interruptions as job dissatisfiers, it occurs to me that anything that erodes career engagement also threatens patient safety. If we could figure out how to control interruptions, we would kill two birds with one stone.

Dr. Whitcomb is Chief Medical Officer of Remedy Partners. He is co-founder and past president of SHM. Email him at [email protected].

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