Care and comfort rounds: improving standards

Abstract

Person-centred, safe and effective care is at the heart of delivering the fundamentals of care. Patients, the public and the nursing profession want high quality of care to be assured. Today there are many challenges to achieving this ambition reliably and consistently. This article reports a nursing team’s experience of implementing ‘care and comfort’ rounds over time. The means of implementation is detailed plus the evidence to support the quality improvement achieved. The evidence includes measures of incidence of slips trip and falls, call buzzer use and patient experience data. The results show that the implementation of care and comfort rounds led to proactive rather than reactive nursing care being delivered; the number of patient falls was reduced; the use of call buzzers was reduced; patient experience was enhanced; a more controlled environment was provided for patients and staff satisfaction in care delivery was increased.