1. Introduction
Since a nursing organization is likely to interact not only among nurses but also with various occupations including doctors in a hospital, communication skills of nurses are essential to handle practical tasks. Effective communication skills help in finding solutions to patients’ problems and enhance students’ self-confidence of taking care of patients [1]. Ineffective ways of communication negatively affect mortality rates, abnormal cases, near miss cases, and financial loss in healthcare fields as well as complaints among patients [2]. In addition, communication problems impair relations among doctors and nurses and cause frustrations and stress as well [3].
According to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations [4], handover problems were one of the major causes of incidents that involved harm from 1995 to 2006, and among these, critical cases resulted mainly from a communication problem. Handovers are essential for patient safety since they are to maintain the continuity of nursing by delivering accurate information on patient conditions, nursing records, and recent changes [5-6]. According to one domestic research by Kim, et al., [7], 5.7% of the participant nurses were sure that they implemented the handover process appropriately and 12.1% were sure that they took over the duties properly, which indicates that even clinical nurses doubted the precision of handovers. Besides, most nurses expressed dissatisfaction with handovers [8], regarding time of handovers, unnecessary or inaccurate contents, lack of confidence, lack of standardized tools, and so