[Structured patient handover in intensive care medicine]

Intensive care units must always be prepared to admit or accept critically ill patients for intensive care monitoring or therapy. External admissions can take place via the emergency physician or transfers from other hospitals, while internal patients can be transferred, for example from normal wards, the emergency department or functional areas such as the operating room (OR), cardiac catheterization laboratory, interventional radiology. All relevant information should be communicated during these handovers to ensure maximum patient safety. We would like to raise awareness of the possible dangers and risks of handovers in intensive care medicine and, at the same time, offer a proposal for a comprehensive, structured patient handover, taking into account existing handover schemes with a "4-phase model", with a focus on the necessary thought processes before and after the actual handover.