![]() What is going on with the patient? What is the situation you are calling/communicate about?įirst, the speaker presents the situation, by identifying himself, stating the patient’s name and briefly describing the problem 19 The SBAR tool is regarded as a communication technique that increases patient safety and is current ‘best practice’ to deliver information in critical situations. 18 Besides, it reduces inhibitions especially in hierarchical context by encouraging the sender to provide a personal assessment and suggestion of the situation (‘Recommendation’). 16 Furthermore, it enables a preparation before the communication process, 16 17 and because sender and receiver share the same mental model, understanding and awareness are expected to be higher. 12–15 By virtue of a clear structure, SBAR calls for the provision of all relevant information, organised in a logical fashion. 9–11 The SBAR (situation, background, assessment, recommendation) instrument (see table 1) and its derivatives ISBAR, SBAR-R, ISBARR and ISOBAR fulfil this need and are widely used in different healthcare facilities as a communication and hand-off tool both intraprofessionally and interprofessionaly. 8 To overcome these barriers, communication strategies are desirable, which take little time and effort to complete, deliver comprehensive information efficiently, encourage interprofessional collaboration and limit the probability of error. 7 The components and processes of communications are complex and prone to misunderstanding. ![]() Such settings include the perioperative period, 5 the intensive care unit (ICU) 6 and the emergency department. 4 Poor communication is found in many different healthcare settings and is especially prominent in patient hand-offs and settings where fast and effective management is indispensable. The Joint Commission reported that poor communication is a contributing factor in more than 60% of all hospital adverse events they reviewed. Following the definition of Brennan et al, 3 adverse events are injuries that are caused by medical conduct resulting in prolonged hospitalisation and/or disability at the time of discharge. 2 To illustrate the impact of patient safety on healthcare quality, the incidence of adverse events is commonly cited. ![]() International Journal of Clinical Practice Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.Patient safety is crucial for the delivery of effective, high-quality healthcare 1 and is defined by the World Alliance for Patient Safety of WHO as ‘the reduction of risk of unnecessary harm associated with healthcare to an acceptable minimum’. Communication between caregivers should feature more prominently in graduate and postgraduate training, to become engraved as an essential skill and quality characteristic of each caregiver. Peer review, process indicators and follow-up tools are required to measure the impact of quality improvement initiatives. The delineation of ownership of the communication process should be clear. There is room for improvement of both content and timeliness of written communication. It was found that poor communication can lead to various negative outcomes: discontinuity of care, compromise of patient safety, patient dissatisfaction and inefficient use of valuable resources, both in unnecessary investigations and physician worktime as well as economic consequences. Reviewers screened 4609 records and 462 full texts were checked according following inclusion criteria: (1) publication between January 1985 and March 2014, (2) availability as full text in English, (3) categorisation as original research, reviews, meta-analyses or letters to the editor.Ī total of 69 articles were included in this review. We aimed at reviewing the literature on the quality of written communication, the impact of communication inefficiencies and recommendations to improve written communication in healthcare.Ī search was carried out on the databases PubMed, Web of Science and The Cochrane Library by means of the (MeSH)terms 'communication', 'primary health care', 'correspondence', 'patient safety', 'patient handoff' and 'continuity of patient care'. Written communication remains the most prevalent form of communication between specialised and primary care. Effective and efficient communication is crucial in healthcare.
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