Nursing Handoff Education Using Experiential and Virtual Innovations.

Area of Science:

• Nursing Education
• Patient Safety
• Communication in Healthcare

Background:

• Ineffective communication, including patient handoff errors, contributes to 70% of serious medical errors.
• Nursing students report a need for enhanced handoff training, yet educational approaches are inconsistent.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate two innovative curricular approaches for teaching patient handoff skills to nursing students.
• To assess the impact of experiential and virtual learning methods on handoff completion, accuracy, and quality.

Main Methods:

• Implementation of two distinct handoff education curricula based on Bloom's taxonomy: an experiential approach and a virtual approach.
• Evaluation of student performance in handoff completion, accuracy, and context-based quality.

Main Results:

• The experiential approach yielded an average handoff completion rate of 84%.
• The virtual approach demonstrated significant improvements, with handoff completion rates increasing from 25% to 63% and accuracy rates rising from 13% to 31%.

Conclusions:

• Both experiential and virtual educational methods effectively enhance nursing students' ability to perform patient handoffs.
• The flexibility of these complementary innovations allows educators to adapt handoff training to specific curriculum and course contexts, aligning with Bloom's taxonomy.