When a patient's care is transferred from one doctor to another, this process is called a "handover." If a handover is done poorly, it can lead to preventable medical errors, delays in treatment, and negative effects on the patient's health. For patient safety and the best possible medical results, it is critical that the transfer of care between physicians is effective.
This research focuses on a particularly complicated type of handover: when a patient moves from an acute care setting to a rehabilitation setting. "Acute care" refers to the short-term, intensive treatment a person receives in a hospital for a serious illness, an injury, or after surgery. "Rehabilitation" is a type of care that helps patients recover and regain abilities, often taking place in a specialized facility or a dedicated wing of a hospital.
The transfer of patients between these two environments is difficult because the patients are often medically or surgically complex. This requires sharing detailed and current information to ensure their care continues smoothly. Furthermore, acute hospitals and rehabilitation facilities often have different operational cultures and different primary goals for patient care, which can complicate the handover process.
While many studies on medical handovers have been published, there has not been a comprehensive review that gathers all the existing research specifically on handovers from acute care to rehabilitation to see how this transition can be improved. The purpose of this study is to conduct a "scoping review," which involves systematically finding and mapping out all the available evidence on the topic of physician-to-physician handovers from acute care to rehabilitation settings.
To do this, the researchers will follow strict, established methodologies known as the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) framework and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines. This ensures the review is thorough and transparent. A comprehensive search for relevant studies will be conducted across seven large electronic collections of scientific research, including MEDLINE, Embase, and Web of Science.
To ensure accuracy, every stage of the review will be performed by two people working independently. This includes the initial screening of articles to see if they are relevant, the process of extracting key information from the selected studies, and the final step of combining the findings.
The data collected from the studies will be summarized in two ways. First, it will be summarized numerically using descriptive statistics (for example, counting how many studies exist on a certain strategy). Second, it will be analyzed qualitatively through content analysis to identify common themes, ideas, and patterns within the research.
The review will include studies that use both numerical data (quantitative) and non-numerical data like interviews (qualitative), as long as they are published in English and discuss doctor-to-doctor handovers from an acute care to a rehabilitation facility. Studies from all over the world will be considered. The review will not include reports on single patients (case reports), reports on small groups of patients (case series), commentaries, research plans (protocols), opinion articles, or summaries from conferences.
