Evaluation of postoperative handover communication

The aim of this study is to assess the current state of handover practices and identify key areas for future research and improvement. We conducted a prospective, cross-sectional observation study using taxonomy for handover behaviors. The study focused on postoperative handovers between the team of anesthesia providers in the operating room and the one of recovery room caregivers. A pilot of five handover observations was conducted to assess the suitability of the data collection tool in the local context. Permission to conduct the study was sought from the ethics committee of Rwanda Military Hospital. The collected data was coded and processed using SPSS 20. To describe the study sample characteristics, frequency and mean were presented. To address main research question a correlation analysis was applied and completed by a multiple linear regression. The significance of the slopes in the regression analyses was tested with a two-sided test, using an alpha level of 0.05. This study documented that postoperative handover quality is still at developmental stage and most of the gaps identified are probably due to lack of clear guideline on the way forward during handover.