Health care usually involves multiple health professionals over a variety of settings. A patient’s care journey may begin with their general practitioner and follow on to a medical specialist, hospital, and then home. At each transition of care, clinical handover should occur.
Clinical handover is the transfer of professional responsibility and accountability for some or all aspects of care for a patient or group of patients, to another person or professional group in a temporary or permanent basis.
The Australian Commission for Safety and Quality in Health Care (ACSQHC) has taken a national and international lead in clinical handover improvement and provides key resources such as The OSSIE Guide to Clinical Handover Improvement to support this work.
The SA Health Clinical Communication and Patient Identification Clinical Directive (PDF 159KB) sets the standard for clinical handover practice across SA Health. The clinical directive requires the use of a standard mnemonic, ISBAR, to support safe practice of clinical handover.
The NSQHS Standard 6: Communicating for Safety describes actions that need to be met for accreditation:
6.7 The health service organisation, in collaboration with clinicians, defines the:
6.8 Clinicians use structured clinical handover processes that include:
The SA Health Accreditation Resource Standard 6: Communicating for Safety identifies the resources that are available to support each action.
The “Know the Plan, Share the Plan, Review the Risk” is a series of six videos developed for the purpose of training staff in best practice clinical handover. This series follows a patient’s journey of care from home to rural emergency department via ambulance, to metro hospital, from recovery to ward, and then transfer back to country hospital for rehabilitation.
TeamSTEPPS® 2.0 AU is an evidence-based program to improve teamwork and communication for the purpose of improving patient safety.
Clinical Governance Unit
Email:
Health.DHWClinicalGovernanceEnquiries@sa.gov.au
