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November 8,2023
Nursing educators emphasise the benefits of bedside nursing handover. A final-year nursing student was surprised to find she never saw it happen during her clinical placements.
The importance of person-centred care has been consistently emphasised throughout my nursing degree course.
However, during clinical placement, I often found this focus hard to see. This was demonstrated particularly in how nurses conducted patient handovers.
In class, our lecturers emphasised the importance of participation by patients and their whānau, and we discussed what patient-centred care would look like, including the benefits of bedside nursing handovers. Despite this, I have yet to witness a bedside handover.
All handovers I observed on clinical placement occurred privately between staff members in the nurses' station, without the patient's involvement. Anecdotally, this also appears to be the experience of many of my fellow student cohort.
In at least one emergency department, reported anecdotally, a combined handover method is used, where the co-ordinator provides an update on all patients, after which the nurse conducts a bedside handover, while this approach was effective, time constraints could lead to rushed bedside handovers, compromising their quality.
The irregularities in handover practice in New Zealand, and lack of patient involvement in non-bedside handovers, led me to investigate the literature to answer this question: Do bedside handovers achieve better patient outcomes than non-bedside handovers?
Continuity of care
The New Zealand Nurses Organisation defines patient handover as the exchange of information between health-care team members to ensure continuity of care can be provided to the patient.1
Patient handovers typically occur during shift changes or when a patient is transferred to a different unit, ward, or health-care facility.l Often, handovers occur in staffrooms or conference rooms when the next shift begins, and do not involve the patient or whanau members.2
During the handover process, incorrect information is frequently passed on because patient participation and perspective are often missing.2 Many errors can be attributed to the provision of incorrect or unreliable information given during handovers.2
In contrast, bedside handovers are a person-centred approach involving the patient, which helps prevent informationsharing errors and results in better patient outcomes and care.2
Workingin partnership
The Nursing Council Code of Conduct sets standards for all nurses working in New Zealand to meet and apply...