Asghar Khan, Sardar Ali, Dildar Muhammad, Hamida Begum, Ijaz Arif.
Barriers in Handoffs among Nurses in Public Sector Tertiary Care Hospital of Peshawar, Pakistan.
J Islamic Int Med Coll Jan ;15(4):254-9.

Objective: To identify barriers in shift handover communication among nurses in public sector tertiary care hospital of Peshawar, Pakistan. Study Design: Cross-sectional study. Place and Duration of Study: The study was conducted in Hayat Abad Medical Complex Peshawar, Pakistan from November, 2016 to August 2018. Material and Methods: Sample size was comprised of 112 registered nurses, selected by simple random sampling technique. All the included registered nurses had minimum one year of experience. Those working at the managerial level, who did not participate in handovers, were excluded. Adopted questionnaire of closed ended questions was used for data collection. Mean and standard deviation were calculated for age. Descriptive statistics of percentages and frequencies were utilized for responses of participants and demographic characteristics of gender, education and experiences. Chi square test was employed to analyze association of gender and barriers (p-value?0.05). Results: Alarming barriers revealed were messy records (91.1 %), unreadable handwriting (83.1%), out-of-date records (76.8%), poor communication skills(80.4%), not listening and interruption (73.2%), irrelevant information (77.7%), handover with junior/senior (70.6%) and disagreement between clinicians(70.5%), unavailability of relevant information (83.4%), unavailability of doctors (81.3%), background noise (75.9%), staff shortage (75.9%) and poor workforce planning (79.5%). No significant association was found between gender and barriers to shift handover (p-value ?0.05) except for unavailability of test results at the time of handover (p-value = 0.02) and difficulty to recognize essential information (p-value = 0.007). Conclusion: The study identified various barriers in public sector hospital which may negatively affect shift handover.

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