Handover strategy

This page describes the target process and application workflow for performing handover. It assumes you are familiar with the way doctors and teams are organised in an NHS hospital.

Note that the term "off-peak team" is used as shorthand for any team covering a hospital on a night shift, weekend or bank holiday. Similarly, "off-peak period" is used as a shorthand for a night shift, weekend or bank holiday.

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During the day, a hospital is positively buzzing with doctors. Each team covers one or more wards (medical teams) or theatres (surgical teams). At the end of the shift, the day teams handover to a handful of teams that cover the night shift for the whole hospital. Similarly, a handful of teams cover the whole hospital on weekends and bank holidays.

The application currently allows a doctor on the day shift to compile one or more patient lists. She then adds tasks to each patient. Tasks will be assigned to the off-peak team as described below.

• The application will automatically generate lists for each off-peak period in advance
  • Note that it is normal for doctors to assign tasks to shifts quite far in the future. For example if she is going on holiday on a Wednesday and wants to assign tasks to the weekend shift.
  • This should be configurable as an admin function so that different hospitals can auto-create lists according to local shift patterns
  • For MVP, we should assume 1 Medical team and one Surgical team
• When a doctor assigns a task to an off-peak team she must choose which grade is able to perform the tasks
  • Complex tasks should not be assigned to Foundation 1 doctors, for example
• The tasks remains on her patient list(s) but it are marked as handed over
• The tasks also show on the off-peak team's list
• When an off-peak team member marks a task complete, it is marked as complete on his list
• And it is marked as pending approval on the owner's list(s)
• When the owner comes into work the next day she can see all the tasks completed by the off-peak team and mark them as complete
• A full history of the changes must be available to the owning doctor