Effects of an interdepartmental handover program on nurses' safe care quality in intensive care units

The quality of safe care is a significant concern for nurses. The importance of transferring the patient from the number of disasters and preventable events caused by poor communication within the health team is revealed; thus, standardizing the delivery process is a tool to ensure high-quality care. The purpose of this study is to develop, implement, and evaluate the interdepartmental delivery program on the quality of safe care of nurses. This quasi-experimental single-group pre-post study was conducted in 2024-2025 at Loghman Hakim Hospital with 70 nurses contributing 140 handover reports selected via convenience sampling. The intervention consisted of three virtual training sessions over three weeks on WhatsApp, based on Kern's six-step educational model. Data were collected using the Rashvand et al. (2015) Safe Care Quality Questionnaire, a Demographic Information Questionnaire, Patient Physiological Information Form, and checklists for delivery and receiving nurses, validated by nursing supervisors. Data analysis was performed using SPSS version 19. Seventy nurses participated in the study. After the educational intervention, checklist adherence showed statistically significant increases from pre- to post-intervention in both receiver and ICU sender nurses (p < 0.001), with large effect sizes. Receiver nurses' total scores increased from 19.07 to 40.97, and sender nurses' scores rose from 24.06 to 42.73. Safe care quality scores also increased, with total ASNC scores rising from 130.49 to 133.93 (p < 0.001). Overall, implementation of the training program was associated with substantial pre-post changes in handover performance and safe care quality indicators; however, given the single-group pre-post design, these associations cannot be interpreted as causal effects. Following the implementation of interdepartmental handover training and standardized checklists, improvements in indicators of safe nursing care were observed; however, because the study used a single-group pre-post design without a control group, the observed changes should be interpreted as associations rather than causal effects, and further multi-center studies are needed to assess the sustainability and clinical significance of these changes.Trial registration: IRCT20231015059729N1; Date 25-10-2023.