Disruptive bEhavior manageMEnt ANd Prevention in Hospitalized Patients Using a behaviORal Intervention Team: Study Protocol for a Pragmatic, Cluster, Cross-over Design

The BIT will provide a proactive psychiatric team that will screen all patients on admission, provide consultation to those meeting established criteria, and recommend interventions to the primary care team for consideration. BIT will also serve to model therapeutics tactics in communication and goal setting to the clinical staff.

Research Questions for the proposed study:

Considering that behavioral health co-morbidity is common among hospitalized medical inpatients and is associated with higher costs of care and staff dissatisfaction, we will ascertain whether the addition of dedicated, trained behavioral intervention team, compared to nursing staff training on trauma informed care and de-escalation techniques provides:

1. meaningful, measureable improvement in the prevention and management of disruptive behavior in the healthcare setting at VUMC, and
2. Improvement in staff perceptions of their ability to manage patients exhibiting disruptive, threatening or acting out behavior

Specifically, using a pragmatic, cluster cross-over trial design where the BIT crosses between 8N and 8S, we will test the hypothesis that presence of the BIT results in: