Receiving care providers' role during patient handover

SummaryPatient handover has been shown to be implicated in incidents and work-flow inefficiencies. Accordingly, increasing research efforts have been devoted to handover. However, the role and perspective of care providers taking over responsibility for the patient have been underrepresented in that research. For this reason, the presented review takes a closer look at receiving care providers.Receiving care providers engage in understanding as well as in questioning the presented information. However, they do so rather infrequently. Handover research needs to clarify how to promote understanding in addition to information completeness during handover. Training initiatives should more explicitly involve the receivers' role and enable a dialog among transferring and receiving care providers that satisfies the needs of both.