Somewhere I read tired health workers are better than fresh workers who need to take over patients (losing context and details in the hand offs). Not sure if that explains it though.
Yes, I've read this several times: it's the handover that is most problematic.
However, IMO you can do things to mitigate this but it involves paying workers who aren't working at full capacity; basically doubling staffing costs I think. If you have a large shift handover period, a staff member doesn't take on a new patient unless they can finish their active input within the shift, it goes to the people sitting idle waiting on the next shift - people are never under a single worker for less than a half-shift; so you can't start with one nurse for half-an-hour at handover and then get passed on, you'd start with that nurse and get half-shift + ½hour. At the back end of the shift the nurse -- and other personnel -- would not be taking on new patients who couldn't be signed-off within their shift, meaning they have fewer patients, meaning they can focus more on handover of the patients for whom it's necessary.
There's probably holes in that, it's like reverse pipelining.
You might get enough effect by having a smaller overlap and having workers shadow the worker who is going off-shift but that's not really reducing handovers so much.
However, IMO you can do things to mitigate this but it involves paying workers who aren't working at full capacity; basically doubling staffing costs I think. If you have a large shift handover period, a staff member doesn't take on a new patient unless they can finish their active input within the shift, it goes to the people sitting idle waiting on the next shift - people are never under a single worker for less than a half-shift; so you can't start with one nurse for half-an-hour at handover and then get passed on, you'd start with that nurse and get half-shift + ½hour. At the back end of the shift the nurse -- and other personnel -- would not be taking on new patients who couldn't be signed-off within their shift, meaning they have fewer patients, meaning they can focus more on handover of the patients for whom it's necessary.
There's probably holes in that, it's like reverse pipelining.
You might get enough effect by having a smaller overlap and having workers shadow the worker who is going off-shift but that's not really reducing handovers so much.