Nursing handover: Are its principles taught in universities during bachelor’s degree?

Abstract

Dear Editor,

As a current PhD student working on my dissertation entitled “Developing a nursing handover process program in pediatric ward: An action research,” I interviewed nurses and students and found that they had little knowledge about the ethical and legal principles of nursing handover and expressed their dissatisfaction about this process.

One of the reasons for this problem, they expressed, was the failure of our bachelor’s degree educational program which lacks a structured course on nursing handover, while nursing handover is a substantial part of a nurse’s duty as each nurse should allocate 38% of his/her working hours in hospital wards every day.[1] Discussing this issue with my supervisors, we decided to further scrutinize the management course content of our bachelor’s program. So, we reviewed the course plan of nursing management in different universities in the country (Iran) and found that although these courses have enough content about general skills for a manager, such as leadership, planning, organizing, and …