Morning Handover of On-Call Issues: Opportunities for Improvement

IMPORTANCE: Handover is the process of transferring pertinent patient information and clinical responsibility between health care practitioners. Few studies have examined morning handover from the overnight trainee to the daytime team. OBJECTIVE: To characterize current morning handover practices in 2 academic medical centers by assessing the frequency of omissions of clinically important overnight issues during morning handover and identifying factors that influence the occurrence of such omissions. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: A prospective, point-prevalence study was conducted in the general internal medicine wards of 2 tertiary care academic medical centers in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 2012 and 2013. Participants included on-call third-year medical students and first- and second-year residents. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: Completeness of morning handover of clinically important overnight issues identified using a targeted medical records review and processes of morning handover characterized by direct observation. RESULTS: We identified 141 clinically important overnight issues during 26 days of observation. The on-call trainee omitted 40.4% (95% CI, 32.3%-48.5%) of clinically important issues during morning handover and did not document any information in the patient’s medical record for 85.8% (95% CI 80.1%-91.6%) of these issues. By univariate analysis, running the list patient-by-patient (ie, the entire team discusses each patient) (OR, 4.32; 95% CI, 1.94-9.60; P