Teaching handover of care to medical students

Handover is a key activity in acute health care, with patient safety implications if it is not performed well. This is becoming more important with shorter working hours and therefore a greater number of handovers. Despite this there is a paucity of evidence to guide education to enhance practice. A teaching session for senior medical students on handover of care was devised, delivered and evaluated, with the aim of producing a theoretically sound intervention that is acceptable to students and can be delivered with limited resources.

Teaching sessions to improve the handover of care have been described before, but the descriptions lacked the detail to allow a reader to deliver the session as intended.

We designed and delivered a 1-hour session on handover for senior medical students. This was based on models of handover practice and education, and was based on broader patient safety education principles. Student satisfaction was high and students rated their knowledge as having improved. No funding and minimal resources were used to develop and deliver the teaching session.

A pedagogically sound teaching session, based on best-evidence theories for modelling handover practice, is presented. The perceived ability to handover has also been extremely high after the intervention. Other educators can use this intervention as a starting point for designing interventions within their own setting, and to allow future research to investigate the effectiveness of such interventions.