Projects

Scottish Handover Development: NES and SCSN

At the Scottish Clinical Skills Network annual meeting in St Andrews on 16th September this year Emma Watson and Philip Cachia challenged the Network to take on the crucial area of 'handover' on behalf of NES and SG. We accepted this challenge and the result is a meeting (hosted by NES and SCSN)on December 22nd at the Lister Institute in Edinburgh. Critically, by the end of the meeting, I think that the tangible outcomes should be:

1. a toolbox of resources for those who are involved in handover and those who teach it: how to do it, how to teach how to do it

2. a charter on handover for the NHS in Scotland to ensure that uptake of these resources happens across the country

3. a strategy for how we are going to measure improvement

Aim of the meeting

Handover is a bread and butter part of everyday emergency and scheduled clinical practice. Good handover is said to improve patient safety and reduce error. The risks of poor handover have been highlighted and are emphasised by its description as a perilous procedure. Clinical handover is constructed from a complex and critical process which is woven from an array of interweaving clinical, social, procedural, technical and human threads. The central aim of this meeting is to make handover better right across the NHS in Scotland.

Objectives

To define what handover is and what is handed over

To confirm how it is done

To identify the place of patient safety in handover

To define what changes we need to make handover better

To identify how improvement in handover can be implemented at a local level in different contexts

To define how we are going to measure and demonstrate improvement