Medical handovers across shifts within a five-day-working model: results from an electronic handover system in an acute NHS trust.

Electronic handover tools have been advocated as a potential strategy to improve the quality of handover, especially during on-call periods at night and weekends. We aimed to quantify, categorise and explore the temporal relationship of handover tasks stored on an electronic handover system (eHandover) in an acute UK hospital trust in which the day-time primary team worked only weekdays, with only the day-time and night-time on-call teams being available at weekends. Second, we evaluated whether tasks that remained in the eHandover system throughout several shifts were likely to be completed.