Handover of Critical Patients in Urgent Care and Emergency Settings: A Systematic Review of Validated Assessment Tools

Abstract

The emergency handover of critical patients is used to describe the moment when responsibility for the care of a patient is transferred from one critical patient care healthcare team to another, requiring the accurate delivery of information. However, the literature provides few validated assessment tools for the transfer of critical patients in urgent care and emergency settings. To identify the available evaluation tools that assess the handover of critical patients in urgent and emergency care settings in addition to evaluations of their psychometric properties, a systematic review was carried out using PubMed, Scopus, Cinahl, Web of Science (WoS), and PsycINFO, in accordance with PRISMA guidelines. The quality of the studies was assessed using the COSMIN checklist. Finally, eight articles were identified, of which only three included validated tools for evaluating the handover of critical patients in emergency care. Content validity, construct validity, and internal consistency were the most studied psychometric properties. Three studies evaluated error and reliability, criterion validity, hypothesis testing, and sensitivity. None of them considered cross-cultural adaptation or the translation process. This systematic psychometric review shows the existing ambiguities in the handover of critically ill patients and the scarcity of validated evaluation tools. For all of these reasons, we consider it necessary to further investigate urgent care and emergency handover settings through the design and validation of an assessment tool.

Keywords

• surveys and questionnaires
• psychometrics
• validity and reliability
• patient handoff
• emergency medical services
• prehospital emergency care