Transfer a Patient Between Beds or Wards

Patients move during a stay — to a different bed for infection control, to a higher-dependency ward as they deteriorate, or to a quieter bay as they recover. A ward nurse initiates the transfer with a short handover, then walks it through to completion. When it completes, the move happens as a single atomic step: the patient’s admission is repointed to the new bed, the old bed is freed, and the new bed becomes occupied — there is never a moment where the patient is in two beds or in none.

Who / when: the ward nurse, when a patient needs to change beds or wards. We’ll follow Nurse Grace moving Mr. Okafor to the high-dependency ward.

1. Ward nurse — open Ward → Transfer.
2. Ward nurse — select Mr. Okafor’s active admission, then choose the destination ward and a free destination bed (the picker only offers genuinely empty beds).
3. Ward nurse — write the handover: the SBAR (the standard Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation handover summary) and the reason for the transfer, so the receiving team knows exactly why he is coming.
4. Ward nurse — select “Initiate”, then “Confirm” to raise the transfer (it gets a reference like TRF-…). It now appears in the Pending transfers panel.
5. Ward nurse — advance the transfer through its steps on the Pending-transfers panel: Accept, then Dispatch, then Complete. On Complete, Mr. Okafor’s admission is repointed to the destination bed.

Note

The bed move is atomic — it happens all at once on Complete. The source bed is freed and the destination bed is occupied in the same instant, so Ward → Bed Map is never wrong and no bed is ever briefly double-booked.

Tip

The SBAR is the receiving team’s first read on the patient. A clear Situation–Background–Assessment–Recommendation is worth more than a long free-text note — it tells the next nurse what to watch for the moment the patient arrives.

What happens next

Mr. Okafor now shows in his new bed on Ward → Ward Board, and the same continuous admission carries on — his observations, his rounds tasks and his medication record all follow him, because the stay was moved, not restarted. The receiving team picks up his care exactly where the previous ward left off. When he is eventually well enough to go home, his stay is closed at discharge, which frees whichever bed he is in at the time.

Follow the trail

• Previous: Admit a Patient to a Ward Bed
• Next: Discharge From the Ward and Free the Bed
• Related: Record Ward Observations With an Early-Warning Score · Administer, Hold or Refuse Medication on the Ward MAR