Effects of education on interns' verbal and electronic handoff documentation skills

Improving handoff communications is a National Patient Safety Goal. Interns and residents are rarely taught how to safely handoff their patients. Our objective was to determine whether teaching safe handoff principles would improve handoff quality.

Our study was conducted on the inpatient services at 2 teaching hospitals. In this single-institution, randomized controlled trial, internal medicine interns (N  =  44) and residents (N  =  24) participated in a 45-minute educational session on safe handoff communication skills. Residents received additional education on effective feedback practices and were asked to provide each intern with structured feedback. Quality of interns' electronic and verbal handoffs was measured by using a Handoff Evaluation Tool created by the authors. The frequency of handoff communication failures was also assessed through semistructured phone interviews of postcall interns.

Interns who received handoff education demonstrated superior verbal handoff skills than control interns (P < .001), while no difference was seen in electronic handoff skills. Communication failures related to code status (P < .001) and overnight tasks (P < .050) were less frequent in the intervention group.

Interns' electronic handoff documentation skills did not improve with the intervention. This may reflect greater difficulty in changing physicians' electronic documentation habits.