Phd ceremony Ms. E.C.M. ten Have: Assessing the quality of interdisciplinary rounds in the intensive care unit

Effective and systematic team communication and coordination are recognized as being crucial for improving quality and safety in acute medical settings such as the intensive care unit (ICU). Communication failures between doctors and nurses lead to increased patient harm, length of stay, and dissatisfaction by care providers. Numerous studies show that collaboration leads to improvement in care and several authors found significant positive relationships between collaboration and patients outcomes. Therefore the Society of Critical Care Medicine has endorsed daily interdisciplinary rounds (IDRs), which are defined as rounds where the appropriate plan of care is agreed on, understood, and executed as planned by all care providers. However, there are no specific structured models or theories found in the literature that describe criteria or goals for IDRs.

The studies constructed by Ten Have within this thesis investigated several aspects of these IDRs in the ICU namely:  assessing the quality of IDRs by development of an assessment scale. This scale contains indicators concerning the technical performance of patient plan of care, and the team process. One study investigated the effect of leadership training on the quality of performed IDRs. A survey was developed to measure the perceptions of the care providers after IDRs on important aspects of patients’ plan of care, because of the different perceptions about the patient plan of care among the ICU care providers.