Adding kindness at handover to improve our collegiality: the K‐ISBAR tool

To the Editor: We read with interest the article by Brewster and Waxman1 published in the Medical Journal of Australia. Building kindness and collegiality into regular handover practice is an obligation of increasing urgency in contemporary medical settings. Clinical handover is often led by junior medical staff and can be perceived as a stressful time for them. Junior doctors have expressed fears regarding public approbation as a contributory factor for stress and burnout.2 Obstetric junior doctors within our own tertiary maternity hospital responding to the Australian Medical Association of Western Australia Hospital Health Check survey reported high levels of stress.3 Ultimately, handover is likely to be a precipitating event for stress and anxiety in this group, and addressing psychological wellbeing during this time will have benefits to both staff and patients.4

In 2018, we built kindness into our labour ward handover process, as part of a formal junior doctor wellbeing initiative. The existing handover structure commenced with individual staff introductions for all members of staff in attendance, including name and role for each staff member. We incorporated a specific staff member to handover, whose sole role, stated during introduction, is “I am here to provide emotional support to the team”. This explicit statement places emotional wellbeing of all staff members at the heart of the priorities for the handover session.

Induction to the roles and responsibilities of the profession has been identified as part of the purpose of handover.5 By building kindness and support into our organisation on a daily basis, we hope to improve the wellbeing of all staff members involved in this small but vital daily interaction and embed kindness and support in the broader workplace culture.

A post‐intervention survey of the response to our emotional wellbeing initiative will be available in July 2019, at which point, we will learn the effectiveness of the added focus on kindness in handover meetings. Preliminary feedback from our junior doctors has been positive.