2007 National Patient Safety Goals
Requirement 2E
Implement a standardized approach to “handoff”
communications, including an
opportunity to ask and respond to questions.
Rationale for Requirement 2E
The primary objective of a “hand off” is to
provide accurate information about a patient’s
care, treatment, and services, current
condition and any recent or anticipated
changes. The information communicated
during a hand off must be accurate in order to
meet patient safety goals.
In health care there are numerous types of
patient hand offs, including but not limited to
nursing shift changes, physicians transferring
complete responsibility for a patient,
physicians transferring on-call responsibility,
temporary responsibility for staff leaving the
unit for a short time, anesthesiologist report to
post-anesthesia recovery room nurse, nursing
and physician hand off from the emergency
department to inpatient units, different
hospitals, nursing homes and home health
care, critical laboratory and radiology results
sent to physician offices.
© The Joint Commission, 2007. Reprinted with permission.