Handovers leak for boring reasons. They happen at the most tired moment of the day. They're verbal, so they depend on what the outgoing shift remembers under pressure. And without a fixed shape, they default to whatever was loudest: the incident gets ten minutes, the quiet warning signs get none.

A 10-minute structure

This is the shape that has worked in homes we know. Ten minutes, same order, every time:

  1. Safety first, two minutes. Any change to risk since yesterday, for any young person. New information from school, family contact, professionals. If nothing has changed, say so explicitly. "No changes" is information.
  2. Each young person in sixty seconds. Mood, meals, meds, appointments kept or missed, anything pending. Not a biography. A position.
  3. Tasks crossing the line, with owners. What didn't get finished, who picks it up tonight, what's due before morning. A task without a name attached doesn't cross shifts, it disappears.
  4. The one thing, one minute. If the incoming shift remembers a single sentence from this handover, what must it be? Say that sentence last.

Written first, spoken second

The conversation matters, but the written summary is the safety net. Night staff come in thin, agency staff come in cold, and tomorrow's day shift wasn't in the room. If the handover only lived out loud, it only exists for the people who heard it.

A handover that isn't written down is a rumour with good intentions.

And a word on the group chat: a handover that lives in a messaging app is a record of children's information sitting on personal phones, outside your control and your retention policy. It feels efficient right up until a subject access request or a safeguarding review asks where that conversation went.

Make the day write it for you

The strongest version is the one nobody has to compose at 9pm. If the day's logs, meds, incidents and tasks are recorded as they happen, the handover summary already exists. In Hande it assembles itself from the shift's real entries: logs complete, meds signed, what's carried to tonight, with the critical items flagged. The ten minutes get spent talking about the young people, not reconstructing the day.