Quality of EMS to emergency department handoffs and communication barriers and challenges; Systematic review

Background: Patient safety is among the most significant issues that health care systems face. One of the top priorities for patient safety has been identified as improving communication during handovers. Our study's goal is to analyze research on pre-hospital and emergency department personnel' perceptions of the handover procedure, as well as studies that have aimed to improve the caliber of EMS-to-ED handoffs.
Method: The inclusion criteria were limited to English-language papers published between 2005 and 2024. We looked through the Google Scholar, Web of Science, Cochrane, and PubMed databases. The inclusion criteria were satisfied by studies that concentrated on care handoffs from EMS to ED physicians inside the ED setting. Only peer-reviewed, English-language research was included.
Result and conclusion: Fourteen of the 65 articles that were selected for full text examination satisfied the requirements for inclusion. Thematic synthesis revealed two types of barriers: cognitive and operational. Effective EMS to ED handovers were found to be hampered by descriptive themes of disrespect and disinterest, redundancy, environmental factors, poor recall, technological issues, information degradation, conflicting goals and perspectives, information loss, lack of training, lack of standardization, lack of feedback, and delays. Several types of interventions were found in the included interventional research, including educational, cultural, and technical ones.