Randomized Controlled Trial of Multimedia Nursing Handoff: Content Validation and Pilot

Objective: This study was undertaken to (1) determine if incorporating multimedia (words and pictures) into nursing patient handoffs would enhance nurses’ learning of patient information and (2) determine the feasibility of conducting large-scale randomized controlled trials comparing two patient handoff methods impact on nurses’ understanding of patient information. Methods: We conducted a double-blind randomized controlled trial of undergraduate nursing students comparing the impact of a Multimedia patient handoff to an SBAR patient handoff on the nurses’ ability to understanding and recall patient information and collect evidence for the feasibility for future large-scale randomized controlled trials. Results: We found no statistical difference between the SBAR patient handoff and the Multimedia patient handoff on nurses’ understanding of patient information, but the SBAR group have a significant (p = 0.03) effect (d = 0.5) on recall of patient information. We recruited a sample 63% larger than anticipated, found no differences in chi-square tests between either group on baseline sample characteristics and all participants completed the experiment without problem. Discussion: We were able to answer our study hypotheses, but further research is necessary to better understand our results. We found no statistical difference between the Multimedia patient handoff and the SBAR on nurses’ understanding of patient information but did find the SBAR had superior recall of information. These findings are partially consistent with multimedia learning research, the inability of the multimedia handoff to improve nurses’ understanding of patient information may have been the result of an expertise reversal effect, but that cannot be determined from this study. All feasibility results indicate that large-scale randomized controlled trials comparing patient handoff methods impact on nurses’ understanding of patient information and nursing errors are feasible. Conclusions: This study successfully married multimedia learning, human error and nursing research to advance our understanding of a complex and longstanding problem in healthcare. Although more research is needed to fully answer our study aims, the results of this investigation support our conclusion that future research is both feasible and promising.