Health CareEffectiveness of interventions to improve patient handover in surgery: A systematic review
Section snippets
Search strategy
A systematic review was conducted in line with Meta-analysis Of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (ie, MOOSE) guidelines for the reporting of systematic reviews of observational studies.17 Using the OvidSP search platform, we searched the Medline, EMBASE, and PsycInfo databases from database inception up to the end of December 2013. The search strategy combined “surgery” AND the terms “information transfer”, OR “information flow” OR “hand over” OR “handover” OR “hand off” OR “handoff” OR
Results
The initial search returned 970 results, 20 of which were retrieved in full-text form for further consideration. After application of the inclusion criteria as described, and the addition of 3 publications retrieved through a hand search of references, a total of 19 studies were included in the final data synthesis (see Fig).12, 13, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38
Discussion
This review is the first to assess the currently published body of evidence for interventions designed to improve the process of surgical handover. The growing recognition of handovers as a key area for process improvement spurred on in part by the Joint Commission SHARE guidelines is reflected in the fact that almost three quarters (14/19, 74%) of peer-reviewed publications on this topic have been published in the past 5 years alone.
The results of this systematic review suggest that checklist-
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Drs Johnston, Arora, and Darzi are associated with the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Imperial Patient Safety Translational Research Centre. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR, or the Department of Health. Rajesh Aggarwal is a consultant for Applied Medical. All other authors declare no conflicts of interest or other sources of funding for this work.