Structured Interdisciplinary Bedside Rounds (SIBR® rounds) serve as a powerful catalyst for improving interprofessional communication within hospital settings. By bringing together healthcare professionals from diverse backgrounds and specialties, these rounds create a structured forum for open dialogue and information exchange.
Providing a dedicated time each morning for the care team to come together to share their insights and closely held misinformation enables the team solve emergent issues in real-time.
By including and encouraging patient and family participation, teams don’t have to deal with subsequent calls and enquiries about what the plan of care is.
SIBR rounds bring the care team together each day to discuss key changes in patient status, new pertinent information, and emerging needs.
Physicians, nurses, pharmacists, therapists, and other experts collaborate to discuss patient care, share insights, and coordinate care plans. This interdisciplinary interaction enhances the depth of understanding of a patient’s condition and fosters mutual respect and appreciation for each team member’s unique expertise. It also improves staff satisfaction as team members insights and concerns are heard.
Moreover, it encourages the development of a shared patient-centered perspective, ensuring that all aspects of a patient’s care are considered comprehensively. We explicitly include the ‘Patient’s subjective goal for the day’ in the SIBR 6-step communication protocol.
As a result, SIBR rounds lead to smoother, more effective communication among healthcare providers, reducing the risk of misunderstandings and emergent needs, while promoting collaboration, and improving patient outcomes and satisfaction.
SIBR also shows a selection of strong outcomes around Staff Job Satisfaction.
There are also fewer results in this category, likely because data must be gathered with additional, dedicated staff surveys.
These strong job satisfaction outcomes are what you might expect from a structured teamwork process that seeks to improve face-to-face communication and the efficiency and predictability of interdisciplinary care, all while reducing physician interruptions and patient complaints.
Whether these improvements reliably translate into improved retention and decreased attrition has not yet been demonstrated, but anecdotal evidence has highlighted the benefits of SIBR as part of staff recruitment, particularly nurses. Individual nurses have shared comments like “I love my job again,” and “I wouldn’t want to work anywhere else.” Individual nursing managers and directors have shared that their open job roles attract many more candidates after the launch of an ACU. These anecdotes suggest that at least some Accountable Care Units have been able to improve the experience of bedside nursing.
“This care model has brought real teamwork to our hospital. Beforehand, doctors had no idea what members of the care team were doing and nurses knew very little about what doctors were thinking.
Today, those problems are gone. Communication is infinitely better and there’s a collegiality and empathy among staff that many of us never imagined was possible.”
– Unit Physician Leader & Hospitalist
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Hospital Teamwork By Design
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