Objective: Critical thinking is instrumental for nurses to address the patients’ complex situations and needs with the continuity of care. The study aimed to identify the relationship of nurses’ critical thinking and clinical decision-making abilities with the quality of nursing handover.

Method: A cross-sectional, descriptive correlational study was conducted with 205 nurses working at the inpatient units of a large referral hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia. Simple random sampling method was used for participant recruitment. Data were analyzed using Pearson's correlation test.

Results: Nurses in this study had a fairly good critical thinking ability, clinical-decision making ability, and handover quality. The results showed that there was a relationship between nurses’ critical thinking and clinical decision-making with the quality of nursing handover (p = 0.001; r = 0.384; r = 0.247).

Conclusions: This study confirms the relationships of the nurses’ critical thinking ability and clinical decision-making ability with the quality of nursing handover. Education level appeared to have the largest influence, it may improve the handover quality three times after being controlled by the other three variables. This study results imply the necessity of having nurses with higher educational background.

Keywords: critical thinking, clinical decision-making, handover, nursing handover