Care service leadership: prepare an effective handover

Identify what needs to continue from day one

Begin with a list of active issues, each with a deadline, an owner and the next decision required.

Describe the service, the people it supports, how support is provided and the management team. Include vacancies, commitments to partners and current projects. An organisation chart alone will not show who covers an absent manager or where an approval has stalled.

Example: a French residential care home is waiting for approval to hire, a supplier needs an answer and a family has not received a promised response. Record who has the information and who can act before the director arrives. This becomes a practical starting agenda without prescribing a reorganisation before the team has been heard.

An organisation chart alone will not show who covers an absent manager.

Explain how the director works with managers, support staff and healthcare professionals. This search concerns leadership of the service; clinical decisions remain with appropriately authorised professionals.

Meet the people who keep the service running

Ask staff to describe a recent difficulty and how they dealt with it.

A request to improve teamwork might involve conflicting instructions, problems covering absences or unexplained decisions. Ask frontline managers and the relevant staff for examples. Also ask which routines make their work easier: understand these before changing them.

Arrange suitable conversations with people using the service and, where appropriate, their families. The French HAS evaluation framework brings together the perspectives of people receiving support, professionals and governance. Applied to a leadership handover, this encourages listening beyond head office.

• What decision do you need in order to move forward?
• What works well and should be preserved?
• Which commitment still needs a response from management?

Routines that make the work easier deserve to be understood before anything changes.

Make delegated authority practical

The director needs to know which decisions they can make and where to take the others.

Work through four situations: approving expenditure, hiring someone, changing working arrangements and responding to an institutional partner. Identify the decision-maker, required information and urgent contact for each. Check the delegations that apply to your organisation.

Name the HR, finance and quality contacts who will actually be available. If head office retains approval for hiring, someone there must own the response. Use meetings with the provider’s leadership to address decisions, rather than recount every activity.

Where a quality project needs dedicated support, the quality and transformation specialism can help define that search. The director retains their assigned responsibilities; the specialist carries out the work agreed with them.

Hand over decisions as well as documents

A useful handover tells the next person what to do, who to involve and why.

Keep a short record for each issue: current position, decision, reasoning, next deadline and contact. Separate firm commitments from options still under consideration. This prevents an interim director’s working assumption from becoming an instruction by default.

Before departure, review the work with the people taking it on. Check access and contacts, then assign anything unresolved. If the permanent director has not arrived, the provider needs to name temporary owners. The care service director role profile helps describe the lasting responsibilities of the position.

Choose cover, permanent recruitment or specialist support

The missing responsibility determines the search: lead the service, fill the lasting role or complete a defined piece of work.

An interim director can lead during an absence or a recruitment process. Permanent recruitment appoints the service’s future leader. Quality or organisational support addresses a specific issue when leadership is already in place.

These approaches can work together, but first consider the people already available. If an internal manager has the authority and support to lead, the external requirement may be narrower. If no one can make decisions for the service, specialist expertise alone leaves that gap. For several services, also consider the responsibilities involved in multi-service care management.

Assess experience and working relationships

Ask how the professional found their feet in a comparable service and involved staff in decisions.

Look beyond the establishment type. Compare the people supported, the management structure, head-office relationships and responsibilities the professional actually held. Discuss an anonymised situation from your service. Listen to their questions, how they set priorities and how they would explain a difficult choice.

The CAFDES competency framework covers areas including service development, teams and resources. Use it as a reference for skills; check the qualifications required for the specific French position with the provider.

Prepare the introduction too: who will welcome the director, introduce them to staff and make the relevant files available? A successful match involves both experience and the ability to work with the team already in place.