Improving Communication among Caregivers Using SBAR

Improving Communication among Caregivers Using SBAR

Introduction

Communication errors are the most common sort of problems faced by the health care professionals. This communication involves the inter-communication between the physicians, the communication between the physician and the Para medical staff, physician and nurses, and physician and the patient. Most common amongst these is the communication between the nursing departments and shifts. These errors have shown to compromise the quality of the health care services provided to patients and results in an ill managed information system. The transfer of the irrelevant information leads to inaccuracy, which will result in a compromised health care delivery services. It is, therefore, important to discover and implement a system that would cover these short comings. SBAR is a dynamic example of this advancement in technology. The implementation has shown to improve the overall quality of information delivered in-between the health care professionals.

Discussion

Communication in the health care settings

Communication is the vital element of the health care system. It is the way of conveying information from one health care professional to another.

The transfer of essential information and the responsibility for care of the patient from one health care provider to another is an integral component of communication in health care. This critical transfer point is known as a handoff. In health care settings, the inpatients are delivered from one ward to another, depending on their medical condition daily. There are proper data of these patients available in the department from where they are being transferred. Before they reach the other department, it is important that their information has been received by the nursing professional working for that department. This information is then used by physicians to plan and continue the patient therapy. The data also helps the nurses to give appropriate care to the patient after reviewing his information.

The common practice of communication followed in the health care settings is the transference of the information using hand-offs. Verbal communication is also a very common practice.

Possibility of errors

With the current trend of hand-offs and verbal communication, there lies an increased risk of communication errors in the health care settings. The usage of plain papers by the emergency departments and the self made hand written reports by nurses, sometimes leads to confusion and difficulty in reading by the other professionals. From a staff viewpoint, giving verbal investigate all normal patients exchanging to and from the lab might need them to leave different patients with additional critical needs. Dull routine verbal reports may additionally occupy nurses from concentrating on vital informative content for those patients with additional complex needs.

As Maughan, Lei & Cydulka, in their research report indicated that, the qualified information in the crisis office or, the emergency department report of a patient was diverse as contrasted with the informative content display in the physicians reported indexes (2011). The purpose for this was discovered to be the time period given for the era of hand-offs specifically. With the occupied routine ...