Patient Handover Practices in Healthcare Settings

Patient handover—the structured transfer of responsibility and clinical information between healthcare professionals—constitutes a cornerstone of safe, continuous care across settings. It spans shift-to-shift nursing reports, operating room to intensive care unit transfers, and patient discharges from acute units to community or general ward care. Effective handover mitigates information loss, reduces adverse events and readmissions, and enhances team situational awareness. Despite global endorsements of standardised frameworks such as ISBAR (Introduction, Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation) and I-PASS (Illness severity, Patient summary, Action list, Situation awareness, Synthesis by receiver), local cultures, workload pressures and variable digital maturity continue to influence adoption. Recent efforts have focused on co-designing protocols with frontline staff, integrating patient and family participation, and harnessing electronic systems to support real-time data sharing. Interdisciplinary collaboration, leadership engagement and ongoing education emerge as common enablers. As health systems worldwide grapple with rising complexity and resource constraints, optimising handover practices remains critical for improving clinical outcomes and patient experience.

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Patient Handover Practices in Healthcare Settings publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in patient handover practices in healthcare settings across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Clinical handover: A formalised process for transferring responsibility and essential patient information between healthcare providers.

Transitional care: Coordinated actions and support enabling patients to move safely between different levels or locations of care.

Standardised communication framework: A structured template (e.g., ISBAR, I-PASS) designed to ensure consistency and completeness of information exchange.

Situational awareness: The shared understanding among team members of a patient’s current status, potential risks and care plan.

Continuity of care: The seamless provision of healthcare services over time, across different providers and settings, to ensure patient safety and quality.

References

1. Shift handover quality in Saudi critical care units: determinants from nurses’ perspectives. BMC Nursing (2023).
2. Patient discharge from intensive care: an updated scoping review to identify tools and practices to inform high-quality care. Critical Care (2021).
3. A proposed model for developing quality and efficiency in transitional care. The TQM Journal (2023).