Implications for practice and research

• It is important to have patients as active partners in the team during bedside handovers and have their voices heard.

• Future qualitative studies are warranted to explore the reasons for individual preferences and identify the barriers and facilitators of implementing bedside handover.

Context

Clinical handover is a valuable source of patient health information for nurses and patients. Numerous studies have found that bedside handover could significantly enhance the delivery of relevant information and decrease miscommunication between patients and nurses.1 Besides, bedside handover could increase patient participation and safety.2 However, the implementation of bedside handover is challenging in clinical settings.2 Nurses’ and patients’ perceptions and preferences are among the most important influencing factors. This study by Oxelmark and colleagues3 described and compared the preference of nurses and patients regarding bedside handover and other handover attributes.

Findings

In 5 months, 218 patients and 101 nurses completed the survey, with 75% response rate for patients and 87% for nurses. These responses led to a preference model, including 1308-patient and 909-nurse choice observations. The model illustrated that patients strongly preferred bedside handover, but nurses preferred handover away from the bedside. Both nurses and patients considered it essential to have patients actively involved in clinical handover so that they could hear what was said and speak up at any time. The different alternatives for communicating sensitive information were not perceived to be essential for nurses and patients.

Commentary

This study was the first study in Europe to understand nurses’ and patients’ preferences for bedside handover. This study was designed based on previous studies in Australia.4 5 However, the main findings in this study were different from those in Australian studies. Nurses in the Australian studies preferred bedside handover and had greater concern about how to hand over sensitive information about patients. These findings may suggest that preference for bedside handover is specific to local context and culture.

Although nurses and patients had different perceptions of bedside handover in this Swedish study, they did have the same preference for one attribute of bedside handover: high level of patient involvement. Both groups believed that patients need to be active partners in bedside handover through listening, asking and being heard. This finding accorded with the Australian studies. These findings suggested that the core value of bedside handover is patient-centred care, which enables communication from patients’ perspectives concerning their prerequisites, needs and willingness in order to fulfil goals within care.

In conclusion, this Swedish study provides new knowledge that patients and nurses had different preferences for bedside handover; however, both preferred a high level of patient involvement and had fewer concerns about the communication method of sensitive information.