Are We Upholding Communication Standards in Nursing Education in Central Canada: Facilitating and Assessing Nursing Students' Handover Skills in the Clinical Setting?

Communication plays a vital role in every aspect of a nurses’ job [1,2]. A component of a nurse’s job that relies heavily on communication is handover reports. Handover reports can be defined as the communication that occurs between two professionals [3]. It occurs when one professional communicates information about a patient’s care to another professional so that they can take over the care of the patient [3,4]. There was evidence that suggested nurses are not being effectively taught how to give proper handovers in their training [4,5]. Handover reports are often undervalued, but yet handover reports have a significant role in patient care because they facilitate the continuity of patient care [3,4]. Poor handover reports have been known to lead to mistakes that have harmed patients [5,6]. Teaching handover reporting skills has been deemed an essential component of undergraduate nursing education [7,8]. Handover reports must convey information about a patient, the care provider, the plan of care, treatments, conditions, and changes [9,10]. Furthermore, handover reports must allow time for clarification of the information shared [11]. A large amount of literature suggested that implementing standardized handover frameworks for handover reports could help to address issues seen with nurses delivering inadequate handover reports [7,12,13]. Teaching a standardized framework once is likely not enough to help the students deliver effective handover reports in practice. Educators may need to foster the use of the standardized handover reporting framework consistently in clinical, and provide the students with regular feedback. Abstract