Assignments & duties
What is a handover?
A handover is the briefing between an officer going off shift and the one coming on, covering what happened, what is outstanding and anything the incoming officer needs to know.
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Free to use on your own site, in training material or in a handout, as long as the credit link stays on it. Paste this where you want the diagram to appear.
<figure>
<img src="https://secureoptix.co.uk/glossary/handover/diagram.svg" alt="handover — diagram from SecureOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
<figcaption>
<a href="https://secureoptix.co.uk/glossary/handover">What is a handover?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://secureoptix.co.uk">SecureOptix</a>
</figcaption>
</figure>It is the point at which continuity either exists or does not. A site covered twenty-four hours by three officers is only continuously covered if each knows what the previous one dealt with.
Outstanding items are the part that falls through. An access issue, a faulty door or a person to watch for is easy to mention and easy to forget to mention, and a written handover is what makes it survive the shift change.
It is also where a shift record gets closed. An incident recorded at handover is recorded hours after the event, which is exactly the weakness a contemporaneous record avoids.
What goes wrong in practice
- Verbal handovers with nothing written, so nothing survives a second shift change.
- Incidents written up at handover rather than when they happened.
- No handover at all where shifts do not overlap.