Nursing Handover Research Project - Wintec Research Archive

Chapter Three
Analysis
Introduction
With handover taking place numerous times a day in hospitals all over the country; the
practice of handover has gained global attention as an area needing quality improvement due
to the high associated patient safety risk (ARCHI, 2010). WHO (2007) has recognised
communication during patient care handovers as one of its top five priorities in its ‘Action on
patient safety- high five’ campaign. This focus on the importance of handover by WHO has
led to worldwide attention and focus on the topic with a proliferation of research being
conducted. This chapter presents the analysis of the textual data that was derived from a
literature search. It presents an analysis of nursing handover text using the first three of
Gee’s steps; significance, activities and identities to identify the constructs within the nursing
handover discourse.
To establish the text for analysis, a literature search was conducted and the following
databases were searched CINAHL, OVID, proquest, EBSCOhost, google scholar and
subsequent reference list searches. The search was narrowed to 2004-2010 scholarly research
to focus on current literature. The word ‘handover’ was used. This led to other terms being
highlighted such as handoff, shift report, continuity of patient care, patient centred care and
more broadly communication, personnel staffing/scheduling and nursing care plans. These
terms were searched and then combinations of each term depending on the database.
Specialist areas were not included such as emergency, mental health, intensive care,
maternity as each of these areas use a specific handover and have their own specific issues.
The focus for this research was on nursing handover so medical handover was not chosen.
Also excluded were inter profession, inter hospital and hospital to other agency handovers.
From this literature search, 42 texts were chosen. These texts included a mixture of primary
research, secondary analysis and opinion articles. Also included were three New Zealand
theses specifically on nursing handover; two qualitative and one of mixed methodology. I
chose also to include Parker, Gardner and Wiltshire’s (1992) foundational work, a qualitative
observational study on nursing handover and also other seminal work from Parker and
Gardner’s (1992) qualitative content analysis which explored the nursing report experience.
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