Nursing Handover Research Project - Wintec Research Archive

around confidentiality and patient privacy. It is a projection of what has occurred during their
day which the incoming shift listen to and in a sense gives the nurse some form of closure.
The text discusses positive aspects of nurses being able to offload a shift in that the shift can
be ‘given away’ and so the nurses are not burdened with the realities of what is nursing work
(Scovell, 2010). This helps relieve professional anxiety that is part of every nurses’ work
(Evans et al. 2008; Strople & Ottani, 2006).
Summary
This chapter has explored some of the constructs that make up the nursing handover
discourse. From Gee’s (2005) first three steps; significance, activities and identities, it was
identified that handover performs many functions aside from communication, and that there
is also a social and cultural provision for nurses. Handover has obvious constructs such as
patient safety, sentinel events and communication, but also has less obvious constructs such
as professional, psycho/social and ritual. Also ever present in handover were certain actors
creating identities; the group identity, the absent identity relating to both nurse and patient,
and the anxious nurse identity. For discussion in the next chapter are the concepts of the two
main competing constructs; patient safety/risk management and nursing ritual.
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