Interactive Handovers: Out of the Dark Ages

Date: May 23, 2014
Filed under: Quality Café, Sharpen Your Skills, Webinar

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All clinicians participate in handovers, and often several or more times a day, yet it is exceedingly rare that handover skills are taught or evaluated in any of the health professions, much less evaluated (in situ) in multi-disciplinary care settings. Compared to other safety critical industries such as commercial aviation, health care is in the dark ages.

Health care lacks a well-accepted definition of handover, much less clear, practical and usable clinical guidelines. We have no reason to be comfortable with a situation that is associated with:

• 80% of adverse events.
• 2,000+ adverse events reported in Interior Health from 2010 – 2012. The majority still go unreported and are causes of significant harm / critical incidents.

Wrae Hill
Manager – Human Factors and System Safety,
Interior Health

Why Wrae cares: As an ex-ICU clinician, I know that handovers are a risky time and are a basic but complex part of care. Each case represents a face, a name and a whole family who is impacted by preventable harm which is within our power to change. This is not rocket science… it is behavioral science – much harder…

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