• Caroline Perkowski, Barbara Eldridge, Adrian D Zurca, Theodore K M Demartini, Gary D Ceneviva, Duane Williams, Xinying Fang, Shouhao Zhou, Neal J Thomas, and Conrad Krawiec.
• Caroline Perkowski was a pediatric intensive care unit fellow, Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, Penn State Health Children's Hospital, Hershey, Pennsylvania, at the time the study was conducted.
• Crit Care Nurse. 2022 Aug 1; 42 (4): 55-67.

BackgroundPreadmission discussions in the study institution's pediatric intensive care unit are not standardized and admission plans were thought to be disjointed, leading to a perceived lack of organization and preparation for the arrival of a critically ill child.ObjectiveTo evaluate the impact of a new, formalized preadmission pediatric intensive care unit interdisciplinary huddle on clinician perceptions of interprofessional communication. The hypothesis was that preadmission huddles would improve unit clinicians' perceptions of interprofessional communication.MethodsInterprofessional pediatric intensive care unit clinicians (physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses, and respiratory therapists) completed surveys before and 7 months after preadmission interdisciplinary huddle implementation. Huddle compliance and perceptions of interprofessional communication in the unit were evaluated.ResultsOf 265 eligible pediatric intensive care unit admissions, 69 huddles (26.0%) occurred. The postintervention survey revealed increased odds (odds ratio [95% CI]) of responding "strongly agree" or "agree" to questions about the opportunity to "communicate effectively with health care team members" (2.42 [1.10-5.34]), "respond to feedback from health care team members" (2.54 [1.23-5.24]), and "convey knowledge to other health care team members" (2.71 [1.31-5.61]) before an admission.DiscussionThis study introduced a formalized huddle that improved pediatric intensive care unit clinicians' perceived communication with other health care team members in the preadmission period.ConclusionsFuture studies are needed to determine if this perceived improvement in communication significantly affects health care outcomes of critically ill children or if these results are generalizable to other pediatric intensive care unit settings.©2022 American Association of Critical-Care Nurses.

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