The Joint Commission defines a handoff as “a transfer and acceptance of patient care responsibility achieved through effective communication. “The time out process is our effort to stop and do a final check before we start the procedure on patients,” says Duffy.Īccording to Duffy, the word “time out” comes from the belief that “we need to step away from the multitude of tasks and focus for this minute on making sure we have the correct patient, the correct procedure and are working on the correct site. If every member of the team focuses on these questions before we begin, we can catch potential errors.” When he appeared on the CBS morning show in 2004, Duffy described a surgical time out by comparing it to the old carpenter’s saying of “measure twice and cut once.” Duffy, RN, MJ, CNOR, FAAN, program director, nursing and health care administration at the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing at Loyola University of Chicago, has been a proponent of surgical time outs and handoffs for many years.ĭuffy was instrumental in the creation of National Time Out Day and the Time Out Toolkit produced by the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN). In the perioperative setting, a handoff occurs when the pre-operative preparation nurse hands off the patient to the OR circulator, when the OR circulator is relieved to go on a break or lunch, or at the end of the procedure when the circulator hands off the patient to the PACU RN. All activities should be stopped and all team members should participate in the time out.Ī handoff is the transfer of a patient’s care from one practitioner to another. The goal is to ensure that it is the correct patient, the consent form matches the procedure to be performed, and the procedure is being performed on the correct side.
In OR parlance, a time out is a pause that’s performed prior to the initiation of an operative or invasive procedure. But these terms have very different meanings in the operating room. When most people hear the terms “time out” and “handoff,” they think of football.
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