The Efficacy of Bedside Nursing Handovers in Improving Information Exchange Quality in Surgical Patients: a Randomised Controlled Trial

Nursing handovers are performed 2-3 times a day for each patient, with an approximate average of 2 million nursing deliveries per year in a hospital of medium size. Nursing handovers are considered essential for the continuity and safety of care. If the relevant clinical information is not shared in a precise and timely manner, it may worsen the patients' outcomes with an increase in adverse events, delays or inappropriate treatment until the omission of procedures.

The modality of nursing delivery presents, therefore, a gap of vulnerability where vital information could not be considered and systematically shared.

Patients should be involved in their care to promote a patient-centred approach. The involvement of patients in handovers is effective compared to other delivery methods.

To date, however, the best mode to deliver handovers was still unclear due to a systematic lack of studies to identify the best practice of nursing handovers. The studies in the literature lack of sound methodologies due to not randomized designs.

Thus an intervention to improve quality of handovers and to implement bedside handovers in surgical wards will be performed.

The following hypotheses were made:

• The introduction of nursing bedside handovers will improve the quality of the information exchanged.
• The educational intervention training intervention will positively modify the nursing handovers.
• There is a relationship between the qualitative level of nursing handovers and working status (expert vs novice) of the nurses.
• There is a relationship between the qualitative level of nursing handovers and the patients' characteristics.