Patient Handover From the Cardiac Surgery Operating Room to the Critical Care Unit: A Prospective Observational Study.

Background: Incomplete and inaccurate information transfer during the patient handover process has many risks, such as disruption of postoperative care and complications. Therefore, effective patient handover is essential.

Aim: This study aimed to evaluate the handover of patients from the cardiac surgery operating room to the critical care unit by examining the type of information transferred, healthcare workers' roles during handover, handover time and frequency of interruptions.

Study design: This is a prospective observational study. The sample of this study consisted of the handover process of 85 cardiac surgery patients at a university hospital, Izmir, Turkey, between January and June 2023.

Results: In this study, it was found that the cardiac surgery team gave more information about systolic/mean arterial blood pressure goals/limits (95.3%), cross-clamp time (95.3%) and surgical procedure (94.1%). The anaesthesia team provided more information about arterial blood gas results (96.5%), and recently administered antibiotics (95.3%). While the surgical residents performed 100% of the patient handovers of the cardiac surgery team, 80% of the patients were only received by the critical care physician. In the anaesthesia team, 97.6% of the patient handovers were performed by the anaesthesia residents, while 81.2% of the patients were received by the critical care physician alone.

Conclusions: This study found that the cardiac surgery team provided more information about the surgical and intraoperative procedures. The anaesthesia team provided more information about the monitoring of the patient's condition and the drugs administered. The most striking finding of the study was that few nurses were involved in most patient handovers. In line with the results of this study, it is recommended to conduct intervention studies to increase nurse participation in patient handover processes and to comparatively examine the effectiveness of handover models involving different disciplines.

Relevance to clinical practice: This study provided a comprehensive evaluation of the handover process of cardiac surgery patients. The findings emphasise the need to establish protocols to overcome knowledge deficiencies in the patient handover process and to ensure the active participation of nurses in this process.