MetrICs to Assess Handover (MICAH)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
MetrICs to Assess Handover (MICAH)
IRAS ID
235518
Contact name
Philip Scott
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University Hospitals Southampton NHS Foundation Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 8 months, 22 days
Research summary
In hospital, a handover happens when you are moved to another ward or when the medical or nursing team briefs the incoming shift about your progress and what needs to be done. Poor handovers can lead to errors, patient harm and delayed discharge.
There are currently about two million medical admissions to NHS hospitals each year. Each patient will have at least four handovers each day. Australian research found that over 15% of handovers gave incomplete information. In the USA, handover errors account for 20% of malpractice claims. NHS data suggests that there are thousands of adverse incidents each year caused by poor handover.
There are various interventions to improve handovers: staff training, use of technology, checklists, protocols and patient/carer participation. There is not enough evidence to establish which interventions are most effective or the full impact of IT solutions. A missing prerequisite is a definitive way to measure the quality of clinical handovers: that is the focus of this project. Once quality measures are established, studies can test which bundle of interventions is most effective and how IT can best support handovers.
We will interview clinicians, patients and their families/carers. We will review previous research and available technology to determine feasible ways to measure handover quality. We want one of the measures to be based on patient and family/carer experiences. We will consult the health IT industry to see how their products can support these quality measures. We will do a three-stage survey, based on the Delphi method, to determine the most useful and practicable measures.
We will apply to the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) for a further study to validate the patient and carer experience measure proposed by this project and later for a feasibility study for the whole prototype toolkit.
REC name
North East - Newcastle & North Tyneside 1 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/NE/0348
Date of REC Opinion
10 Nov 2017
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion