Review local process for clinical handover in collaboration with clinician,
patients and carers
Suggested strategies:
Your review of current policy, process and/or processes surrounding clinical handover
should consider a range of stakeholders.
Relationships, engagement and collaboration that support clinical handover improvement
activities are important factors for change. You should consider engaging the clinical
workforce to identify barriers surrounding use of current handover policy, procedure
and/or processes. This will assist in evaluating local clinical handover processes and can
be used to inform local improvement projects.
While the clinical workforce plays an important role in driving change and improvement,
they still require both senior executives and clinicians across the organisation to provide
leadership and support. Successful implementation of clinical handover policy requires
ongoing commitment at all levels.
Successful review of the current policy must incorporate a mechanism to utilise feedback
from clinicians and patient experience, and also a process to remove bottlenecks and
streamline the clinical handover procedure.
Outputs of improvement processes may include:
• agendas, meeting minutes and/or reports of relevant clinical handover and
quality improvement meetings which show review of risk register or log and clinical
incident reports
• review process in place including feedback from the workforce and patients with
mechanisms for data to be used in focus groups/reviews
• documentation of feedback, recommendations and action taken to reduce
re-occurrence of clinical handover incidents
• report on results of surveys of clinical feedback in relation to clinical handover systems
• feedback mechanisms for the clinical workforce using the clinical handover systems
such as debriefing on individual events or peer review process.