RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NURSING HANDOFF QUALITY AND CONTINUITY OF CARE IN INTENSIVE CARE UNIT

Patient handoff between nurses at shift change has been a crucial process in clinical nursing practice, allowing nurses to exchange necessary patient information to ensure continuity of care and promote patient safety. The aim of the current study was to assess the relation between nursing handoff quality and the continuity of care, in intensive care unit at private Hospital. Descriptive correlational design was utilized to achieve the aim of the study. Data were collected from July to November 2015. The researcher developed the following two tools to collect the data, Nurses handoff checklist & continuity of care checklist. Convenience sample of all available (21) nursing staff. Results revealed that, the majority of observed practices of all handoff procedure were very inadequate, while less than half of them demonstrated adequate practices in all continuity of care. Regarding relationship between quality of nursing handoff and continuity of care, there was negative insignificant correlation between total nursing handoff practice and total continuity of care (p0.28).The study recommended that, the hospital should be: utilize standardized handoff tool prefer to be fully integrated with current hospital electronic health record to ensure completeness and integrity of documentation; set strict policy and procedure to control nurses' negligence to handoff; institute regular training about documentation including handoff; strict monitoring staff compliance to standardized handoff after training