Healthcare Handover and Patient Safety

Abstract

The current literature shows a growing awareness that high-quality handover practices (i.e. mechanisms for transferring information, responsibility, and authority) are critical to ensure continuity of care and patient safety. Inadequate patient handover consistently appears as a factor contributing to adverse events, across healthcare settings and practitioners. Impacts of inadequate handover include delays in diagnosis and treatment, redundant activities such as additional procedures and tests, longer hospital stays, decreased patient and provider satisfaction etc. It has been pointed out that handover processes are highly variable in quality and structure and that there seems to be a lack of consensus about the primary purpose of patient handover resulting in diverse measurement approaches and a broad spectrum of interventions to improve handover. The aim of this symposium is to present recent conceptual, empirical and implementation work on patient handover in a variety of clinical settings and to discuss implications for patient safety.