Changing disciplines: clinical handovers in interprofessional teams

The chapters in this section explore the issues and opportunities that arise when clinical handovers involve team members from different disciplines. Chapter 10 demonstrates how training in the use of the iSoBAR tool can improve students’ performance of clinical handovers in interprofessional ward rounds. Chapter 11 presents the training module developed in light of the research in chapter 10.

Chapters 12 and 13 probe the complexities of handovers in the mental health setting. Chapter 11 demonstrates how interprofessional team members pool and test information accumulated across multiple clinical events in a day to arrive at a diagnosis and treatment plan for each patient. Walsh and colleagues describe how the indeterminacy of the mental health patient’s situation and the need for interprofessional input gives rise to what they refer to as a generative style of handover. They contrast the form and function of this more discursive and elaborated form of clinical handover with the preservative handover that is common between professionals of the same discipline at shift changes. Chapter 12 considers how clinicians can do their best to make sure the mental health patient’s voice is heard in contexts where the patient often cannot be present at the handover. Recognizing the gap in resources in the field of mental health handovers, in chapter 14 Pirone and colleagues provide a clinical handover audit tool specifically tailored for mental health contexts.