Introduction
The influential report ‘To Err is Human’ (Kohn et al. 1999)
has spurred mounting interest in patient safety throughout
the last decade. Accordingly, increased research and regulatory
effort has been devoted to nursing handovers, in an
attempt to understand how to structure these crucial points
of discontinuity (e.g., Riesenberg et al. 2010). A nursing
handover is the exchange of information between nurses
about a patient, involving transfer of control over or
responsibility for that patient (e.g., Hilligoss & Cohen
2011). Existing literature describes handover as an information
transfer activity in which safety and quality are frequently
compromised by efficiency concerns (Hollnagel
2009, Jeffcott et al. 2009). In the search for ways to
improve handover safety, two main approaches have been
suggested: standardisation and resilience. Standardisation
calls for consistency in the processes and content of staff’s
work. Resilience is a more proactive approach, which
focuses on staff members’ anticipation of changes, constant
attention, course correction, reassessment, monitoring and
feedback (Jeffcott et al. 2009).