This scoping review examines the structured communication frameworks and evaluation approaches used in nursing handovers and identifies implications for future rubric development.Following the Joanna Briggs Institute guidelines and the PRISMA-ScR checklist, PubMed, EMBASE, and CINAHL databases were searched for peer-reviewed English-language studies on the development, adaptation, or validation of structured nursing handover tools.Sixty-five studies met the inclusion criteria.The evidence base was concentrated in high-income countries, particularly the United States and Australia (45/65, 69.2%);only one study addressed the educational context.Among structured frameworks, SBAR-based tools were the most common, although local modifications were frequent.Mnemonic-based and checklist-or minimum-data-set-driven tools were equally common (27/65, 41.5% each), with setting-specific variations.Emergency department studies favored mnemonic tools, whereas intensive care settings more often used checklist-driven formats.Among the 50 studies reporting evaluation or validation strategies, prepost outcome evaluations and user feedback or usability assessments were the most common (35/50, 70% each).Outcome assessments focused on process indicators, including documentation completeness or checklist adherence (27/65, 41.5%) and safety-related process checks (24/65, 36.9%),whereas interaction quality (3/65, 4.6%) and patient-level outcomes were scarce.The findings suggest that future handover assessments should prioritize context-sensitive, evidenceinformed rubric development, with stronger psychometric validation and broader evaluation of communication quality and patient outcomes.
Kim et al. (2026) studied this question.