Improving Handovers between Hospitals and Primary Care: Implementation of E-Messages and the Importance of Training

Abstract

The transfer of information and responsibility for care of a patient from one healthcare provider to another is referred to as a handover. While some handovers are effective and achieve high quality communication, others represent a barrier to continuity of care. To increase the patient safety, Norway decided to replace handovers with an electronic e-message system (EMS). This paper refers to a quantitative study of this implementation and examines the opinions of first-line leaders and nurses on how organisational factors were taken into account and how the implementation might be improved. The findings indicate that such factors generally did not receive very much attention in the implementation of the EMS, and less for the nurses than for the first-line leaders. Particularly, the factor most prominently identified by both groups as warranted improvement, was the training