Consent, privacy and communication
Safe handover of information and responsibility across shifts, teams, services and transitions of care in Aotearoa New Zealand
Doctors, nurses, midwives, pharmacists, dental practitioners, paramedics and allied health practitioners registered under the HPCA Act 2003, plus charge nurses, clinical leaders and educators who run handover processes.
Structured learning and a written reflection to show insight after a complaint, an investigation or a responsible authority inquiry.
Focused learning on a core standard of practice, with a certificate and reflection for your portfolio.
This course teaches health practitioners in New Zealand how to hand over patients safely: at shift change, when escalating a deteriorating patient, when transferring between wards, hospitals and districts, at discharge to general practice or aged residential care, when maternity care moves between a lead maternity carer and specialist services, and when continuity depends on recall systems and test-result follow-up. It treats handover as two things at once: passing on information, and transferring responsibility for a person's care.
Its audience is every practitioner registered under the HPCA Act 2003 who hands over care, from doctors, nurses and midwives to pharmacists, dental practitioners, paramedics and allied health staff, along with the clinical leaders who design handover processes. It teaches ISBAR, read-back and handover checklists side by side with the Health Quality & Safety Commission's (Te Tāhū Hauora) programmes on patient deterioration, Kōrero mai escalation, shared goals of care, medicine reconciliation and the surgical safety checklist.
Handover failures appear again and again in Health and Disability Commissioner opinions, often as breaches of Right 4(5) of the Code of Rights, which requires providers to co-operate so that care is continuous and of good quality. The course works through real HDC decisions about lost incidental findings, patients left without an accountable clinician, discharge instructions that never arrived and inter-district transfers made on paperwork alone, and shows how to give, receive, document and improve handover, and what insight and remediation look like if a handover concern is raised about you.
10 sections · 25 lessons · 3 hours (estimated) · 20-question final assessment
Final assessment
20scenario-based questions
Certificate of completion
A certificate of completion for your learning portfolio.
The course includes a structured reflective account template: guided prompts to record what you learned, how you will apply it and how the change will show in your practice. It gives you written evidence of insight after a concern, and a ready record for your CPD portfolio.
Write it in your own words and leave out anything that could identify a patient, a colleague or a case. If you have an open complaint or case, talk to your adviser before reflecting on it in writing.
The course treats handover as both information exchange and a transfer of responsibility. It shows how to identify the point at which accountability moves, how the Right 4(5) duty for providers to co-operate applies, and what the giver and the receiver each remain responsible for.
Yes. You practise structured handover with ISBAR, including identification, outstanding tasks, pending results, risks and goals of care, and confirm understanding with read-back, questioning and closed-loop communication. A separate lesson covers handing over a deteriorating patient using trends, early warning scores and the escalation plan.
Yes. The course explains how responsibility passes between an LMC and specialist services under the Referral Guidelines and a three-way conversation, alongside transfers between wards, hospitals and districts and discharge to general practice, aged residential care and community services. Worked examples follow a woman from community care into hospital and back.
The course shows how to include patients and whānau in a culturally safe, private and effective way, and how Kōrero mai escalation lets whānau raise concern about deterioration. It also covers documenting handover so the record shows what was passed on, what was accepted and what remains outstanding.
Every legal and regulatory point comes from primary sources: the HPCA Act 2003, the responsible authorities' standards and the Code of Health and Disability Services Consumers' Rights. Anything we cannot confirm is left out.
Lessons, scenarios and assessment questions are written by us for each edition separately, then checked for accuracy, teaching quality and fair assessment before publication.
When a code, standard or law changes, the affected courses are reviewed and updated. Reported errors in legal or regulatory facts are corrected first.
Accurate, honest and defensible notes: what a good entry contains, late entries and corrections, AI scribes, access requests and the 10-year retention rule.
Recognise and escalate sepsis early with NZEWS, MEWS, PEWS, Kōrero mai and the Raise the Flag pathways, in hospital, primary care and the community.
Interprofessional teamwork: role clarity across scopes, individual accountability, MDTs, whanaungatanga, conflict resolution, bullying and harassment.
