(1276) Sparking Joy in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit by Decluttering Patient Doors

Introduction: Patient door signs are an important way to communicate to the healthcare team about the patient’s status—such as infectious precautions—but can also lead to visual clutter. In our Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), we planned to roll-out signs that identified if patients were at high-risk of cardiac arrest to improve situational awareness. Prior to this, we wanted to assess the number and necessity of our patient door signs.

Methods: We audited the number of patient signs in our PICU in May and July 2023. We counted the number of signs on each patient door, identifying if the room was occupied or not. We also tracked the sign types and grouped them into categories. After our initial audit, we met with stakeholders to identify whether each sign type was value add. Descriptive statistics were performed, as well as two-tailed t tests.

Results: We found a statistically significant difference in the average signs prior to intervention and after intervention (3.5 versus 0.69, p< 0.05). Prior to intervention, there was no significant difference between the average signs on occupied and unoccupied rooms (3.6 versus 3.5, p = 0.84). After intervention, we found a significant difference between the average signs between occupied and unoccupied rooms (1.1 versus 0.4, p < 0.05). The most common sign types prior to our intervention were: “CLABSI corner” and daily rounding reminders. After our intervention, the most common sign type was fall-risk.

Conclusions: We were able to significantly reduce the average number of door signs by categorizing signs and identifying if they were value add with stakeholders. The significant difference in the average signs between occupied and unoccupied rooms after intervention is likely indicative of tailored patient signs, as shown by fall-risk being the most common type of sign. Given our reduction in visual clutter, we are hopeful that our roll-out of high-risk patient signs will be successful.