| Popis: |
Aims To reduce the time paediatric surgical patients spent fasted unnecessarily through a quality improvement initiative that provided healthcare staff with a tool to review fasting times regularly. Methods After nursing staff frequently highlighted concerns that patients were fasted longer than necessary at a district general hospital, often without regular review of this decision, a new proforma entitled ‘The Ticking Clock’ was introduced. It provided nurses with a tool, to re-evaluate and re-assess a patient’s fasting status every two hours with the surgical team. Introduction of the ‘Ticking Clock’ was the primary intervention, however highlighting the issue at hand to both the paediatrics and surgical departments, as well as engaging the Practice Development Nurse to help with educating nurses about the new intervention were also undertaken to help implement the change. Data was collected over a two week period prior to our intervention, with data collection being repeated six months later. Our primary outcome was the average time paediatric surgical patients spent fasted in total, with a focus on emergency surgical patients. Results The preliminary study collected data for 14 patients in total. These were predominantly admitted under General Surgery but also included those admitted under Orthopaedics, Urology and Gynaecology. The re-auditing process collected data for a total of ten patients, six months after the intervention was implemented. On comparing the two data sets, there was a notable reduction in time patients spent fasted. On average post implementation, patients spent 7 hours 13 minutes in total fasting compared to 14 hours 48 minutes prior to introduction of ‘The Ticking Clock’. Conclusion The implementation of ‘The Ticking Clock’ significantly reduced the average time paediatric surgical patients spent fasted by 50% over the course of 6 months in a district general hospital. Further studies to investigate its improvement on patient experience directly can be built from this. |
