(Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare: Oakbrook Terrace, IL) -- An estimated 80 percent of serious medical errors involve miscommunication between caregivers when patients are transferred or handed off. In addition to patient harm, defective hand-offs can lead to delays in treatment, inappropriate treatment, and increased length of stay in the hospital. The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare is releasing a hand-off communications targeted solutions tool (TST) to assist health care organizations with the process of passing necessary and critical information about a patient from one caregiver to the next, or from one team of caregivers to another, to prevent miscommunication-related errors.

Ineffective hand-off communication is recognized as a critical patient safety problem in health care. The hand-off process involves “senders”—the caregivers transmitting patient information and releasing the care of that patient to the next clinician—and “receivers,” the caregivers who accept the patient information and care of that patient.

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