Creation of a Postpartum Roadmap and Whiteboard: A Family's Step By Step Guide Towards Their Jouney Home

Purpose for the program: To manage postpartum patient and family expectations of their hospital stay from admission to discharge home through the use of the postpartum roadmap and whiteboard.  Patient feedback indicated new families were uncertain of what to expect from caregivers and what was expected of them in regards to learning all of the postpartum and newborn skills needed for a successful discharge.

Proposed change: Rather than allowing patients to stay in the dark about their care, going shift to shift learning what tests, skills, and education would occur, an interdisciplinary team set out to create a tool that allows families to navigate their way to a successful discharge beginning the moment they arrived on the postpartum unit. The postpartum roadmap and whiteboard guide the new family through everything that will occur during their postpartum stay. By allowing the family to know exactly what they can expect of the caregivers and what they in turn will be expected to learn and demonstrate, we have innovatively created an interactive tool that outlines every phase of the postpartum hospital stay.

Implementation, outcomes and evaluation: After reviewing input from nursing, physicians, patient education, marketing, social work, patient satisfaction surveys, and both current and previous patients, two tools, one written roadmap and one whiteboard, were created which broke the postaprtum experience and expectations for families into six phases. They include:

• admission
• phase one: getting to know your baby
• phase two: preparing to be a family at home
• phase three: complete all patient tests
• phase four: you are ready to go home
• discharge

All staff on the four mother/baby units were educated on how to communicate the roadmap and whiteboard upon the patient's admission to the floor. Evaluation surveys were given to both staff and patients to ensure satisfaction on both parts was obtained. The survey results showed staff appreciated patients having a written tool they could refer to after being educated on expectations during the postpartum stay. Patients showed to enjoy referring to the written tool as well as the visual ease of the whiteboard which using both put them at ease with concerns about expectations of their care.

Overall, since implementing the tool in January, 2013, all postpartum units have seen a 15.8 % increase in very good response to press ganey's survey question on discharge preparedness.

Implications for nursing practice: The postpartum roadmap and whiteboard may be valued tools that allow nursing and patients to fully communicate all stages and expectations of postpartum care. This is an innovative approach to nursing including  their patients in the plan of care.

Keywords: roadmap, postpartum plan of care, whiteboard