The Handover File: What to Write Before a Move

Why this document is worth an afternoon

When somebody moves into a supported home or starts with a new in-home team, the incoming workers know what is in the paperwork: the support plan, the risk assessments, the service agreement. What they do not know is the person.

Left to itself, that gap gets closed by trial and error over about six weeks, and the errors land on the person who moved. A handover file closes most of it in a fortnight. It is not a clinical document and it does not replace one. It is the set of things a parent, a sibling or a long-standing worker knows and has never had to say out loud.

Keep it to one page, plus attachments

The single biggest failure of these documents is length. A twelve page profile is read once by the person who filed it. One page gets read on a first shift and stuck inside a cupboard door.

So write one page of the things that change how a shift goes, and attach the formal documents behind it rather than summarising them. Where a mealtime management plan, a behaviour support plan or a medication chart exists, the handover file should point to it by name and location and say nothing more. Those documents belong to the clinicians who wrote them.

Write it in plain sentences and in the person's own words where you can. Avoid describing anyone as difficult, and avoid the phrasing that turns a preference into a problem.

What belongs on the page

How the day starts. What time, how they like to be woken, how long they need, and what a bad morning looks like. Mornings set the tone for everything after them.

How they communicate, in detail. The words they use for things, the gestures that mean something specific, and whether a yes is reliable when they are tired. This is the entry that prevents the most trouble.

Food. Loves, refuses, and the one meal that always works. Where a mealtime plan exists, name it and stop there.

What settles them and what escalates things. Two short lists of concrete actions. Not "likes music", but "the radio on low in the kitchen, not the television". Not "gets anxious", but "a changed plan without warning".

What normal looks like for this person. Their usual mood, appetite, sleep and energy, so a worker who has known them a week can tell that something is different. This is the most valuable and most often omitted entry in the whole file.

Sleep and the night. Bedtime routine, whether they wake, whether they will call out or will not, and what to do if they do.

People. Who is family, who is a friend, who they will ask about, who is allowed to visit, and who to ring first.

Money and belongings. What they manage themselves, what they need help with, and the possessions that must not be moved or borrowed.

The routines that are not negotiable. The Friday commitment, the phone call every Sunday, the football team, the order of the bathroom. Small on paper, load-bearing in practice.

The three things people forget

First, the baseline. Almost every file describes what to do and almost none describes what usual looks like, so a new team has no way of noticing a change in the first month. Write down the ordinary.

Second, what has already been tried and did not work. A new team will otherwise spend a fortnight rediscovering it, and the person has to live through the experiment twice.

Third, what the person themselves wants written down. Ask them directly, and write their answer in their words. Some of what they nominate will surprise you and most of it will be more practical than what the family chose.

What to leave out

Anything clinical that belongs to a clinician. Doses, thickened fluid ratios, restrictive practice authorisations and behaviour strategies live in the plans written for them, and a summary in a handover file is a way for two versions to drift apart.

Old history that no longer helps anyone. A file is not a case history, and a paragraph about something that happened in 2009 usually shapes how a new worker sees a person before they have met them.

Judgements dressed as facts. "Attention seeking" is a judgement. "Comes out of his room when the house goes quiet" is a fact, and it is the one a worker can act on.

Personal details of other residents. The file follows one person, and in a shared home the others have their own privacy.

Who holds it, and when it gets reviewed

The file belongs to the person, not the provider. Give a copy to the incoming team, keep the original, and note the date on it so nobody works from a version that is a year old.

Then set two review points. One at fourteen days, where the incoming workers add what they have learned and correct what the family got wrong, and one at ninety days, where it becomes the settled version. Our guide to the first ninety days in a SIL home covers what else lands in that window.

If the move is to in-home support rather than a shared home, the same file does the same job for a rotating team, and the fourteen day review matters more because there are more people learning. We cover the first shift itself in your first shift with a new support worker.

One last practical point. Ask the provider where it will live and who will actually read it, because a handover file scanned into a document system that workers do not open on a shift has achieved nothing. In our homes the version that works is printed, in the house, and updated in pen.