Nursing handover: It’s time for a change

Abstract

Nursing handover is a common part of nursing practice that is fundamental to safe patient care. Despite this, the literature provides little direction on the best way to conduct handover. This project aimed to examine nurses' perceptions of handover and to determine the strengths and imitations of the handover process. A staff survey was distributed to nurses in all inpatient wards at a metropolitan tertiary hospital. A total of 176 nurses responded to the staff survey. The findings revealed conflicting opinions about the effectiveness of the handover process; although a number of nurses were positive about current handover practice, indicating they were provided with sufficient information about patients and given opportunity to clarify patient care information, other nurses identified aspects of handover that could be improved. These included: the subjectivity of handover information, the time taken to conduct handover, repetition of information that could be found in the patients' care plans, and handing over of information by a nurse who has not cared for the patient. Some attention needs to be given to addressing the perceived weaknesses associated with the handover process.

Nursing handovers as resilient points of care: linking handover strategies to treatment errors in the patient care in the following shift

“…The final category -outcome measures -usually assesses staff's perceptions of or satisfaction with the handover (Borowitz et al 2008, O'Connell et al 2008, Chaboyer et al 2010, Farhan et al 2012, Klim et al 2013, providers' confidence (Payne et al 2012) or perceived near-miss on-call (e.g. Payne et al 2012).…”

Perspectives of clinical handover processes: a multi‐site survey across different health professionals

“…In addition, ineffective handovers can cause major problems relating to lack of delivery of appropriate care and the possibility of misuse or poor utilisation of resources (Arora et al 2005, Siddiqui et al 2012). Previous survey studies of clinical handover have mainly focused on considering the perspectives of doctors (Fassett et al 2007, Karnwal et al 2008, Johner et al 2013, Lindsay et al 2013, Mazhar et al 2013, Kessler et al 2014 or nurses (O'Connell et al 2008, Street et al 2011. However, the delivery of high-quality clinical handovers often requires communication and collaboration between different health professions.…”

What makes handover communication effective?

“…This finding is supported by other studies. [7][8][9] Although there was no statistically significant difference in either mean rank scores or percentage of agreement, there was a trend in the data suggesting that nurses perceived verbal handover taking less time, as well as less interruption by patients during handover (postintervention), compared with sitting and reading a report alone in a closed room (preintervention).…”

“…The Clinical Handover Staff Survey, developed to foster information from nurses about their perceptions of the handover process, consisted of 20 statements on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from Strongly Disagree (1) to Strongly Agree (7). (See Table 1.)…”