A before-after study of multidisciplinary Out-of-Hours handover: combining management and frontline efforts to create sustainable improvement.

Objective: The importance of implementation strategy in systems improvement is increasingly recognized and both 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' approaches have significant barriers. A trial of a combined approach involving frontline and managerial staff therefore seems merited. We attempted to improve handover using a Human Factors-based approach integrated with a combined 'top and bottom' implementation strategy.