See Primer. The process when one health care professional updates another on the status of one or more patients for the purpose of taking over their care. Typical examples involve a physician who has been on call overnight telling an incoming physician about patients she has admitted so he can continue with their ongoing management, know what immediate issues to watch out for, and so on. Nurses similarly conduct a handover at the end of their shift, updating their colleagues about the status of the patients under their care and tasks that need to be performed. When the outgoing nurses return for their next duty period, they will in turn receive new updates during the change of shift handover.

Handovers in care have always carried risks: a professional who spent hours assessing and managing a patient, upon completion of her work, provides a brief summary of the salient features of the case to an incoming professional who typically has other unfamiliar patients he must get to know. The summary may leave out key details due to oversight, exacerbated by an unstructured process and being rushed to finish work. Even structured, fairly thorough summaries during handovers may fail to capture nuances that could subsequently prove relevant.

In addition to handoffs between professionals working in the same clinical unit, shorter lengths of stay in hospitals and other occupancy issues have increased transitions between settings, with patients more often move from one ward to another or from one institution to another (e.g., from an acute care hospital to a rehabilitation facility or skilled nursing facility). Due to the increasing recognition of hazards associated with these transitions in care, the term "handovers" is often used to refer to the information transfer that occurs from one clinical setting to another (e.g., from hospital to nursing home) not just from one professional to another.