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.
Use this diagram
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<img src="https://secureoptix.co.uk/glossary/handover/diagram.svg" alt="handover — diagram from SecureOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://secureoptix.co.uk/glossary/handover">What is a handover?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://secureoptix.co.uk">SecureOptix</a>
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</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.
In practice
A day shift relieving nights on a construction site.
The night officer mentions that the rear gate padlock is stiff and he has been shutting it hard. The day officer nods. Nothing is written down.
Three shifts later a different officer finds the gate open and assumes somebody has been through it. The padlock has simply failed, as it was always going to, and the fortnight of warning is in nobody's record.
Handover is where a site's small knowledge either survives a change of face or does not, and the test is whether the fourth officer along knows what the first one noticed.
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.