• Cornelie Salzwedel, Victoria Mai, Mark A Punke, Stefan Kluge, and Daniel A Reuter.
• Department of Anesthesiology, Center of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, Martinistrasse 52, 20246 Hamburg, Germany. Electronic address: c.salzwedel@uke.de.
• J Crit Care. 2016 Apr 1; 32: 170-4.

PurposeHandover of patient care is a potential safety risk for the patient due to loss of information which may result in adverse outcome. We hypothesized that a checklist for handover from the operating room (OR) to the intensive care unit (ICU) will lead to an increase of quality regarding information transfer compared with a nonstandardized handover procedure.Materials And MethodsThe study was conducted as a prospective, randomized trial in a university hospital. The quality of handovers with checklist was compared with handovers without checklist. Handovers were recorded by digital voice recorder and analyzed using an individual rating sheet for each patient. This enabled to discriminate between items that "must be handed over" (red items) and items that "should be handed over" (yellow items).ResultsA total of 121 patient handovers from OR to ICU were included. Significantly more red items were handed over in the study group compared with the control group (study group: median 87.1%, 25-27 percentile 77.1%-90.0%; control group: median 75.0%, 25-75 percentile 66.7%-88.6%; P < .01).ConclusionsThis study gives first evidence that the use of a standardized checklist for patient handover from OR to ICU increases the quantity and quality of transmitted medical information.Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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