Integrating hand-off communication into undergraduate nursing clinical courses

Abstract

With the growing complexity of healthcare, the ability to communicate becomes essential within the interprofessional team. Healthcare organizations have great expectations for new graduate nurses to communicate skillfully while promoting safe patient care. Nursing students may lack experience with interprofessional communication skills and are fearful of making mistakes which may jeopardize patient safety and undermine student self-confidence. Hand-off is the communication of information between people or disciplines. A student hand-off communication activity was developed and implemented as a clinical skill-building activity across several undergraduate clinical nursing courses.  Evaluation of this activity revealed positive perceptions from both students and staff.