Effective Communication: Reducing Error and Improving Safety

Ineffective communication in healthcare is a major contributor to medical errors and patient injury worldwide. Current use of SBAR alone has proven inadequate as it fails to promote communication competence, assertiveness, and clarity. These unresolved factors contribute to poor team communication, leadership, trust, and client outcomes. This contributes to the 1.7 billion dollars in lost profit as well as preventable deaths. To address this need for change, a literature review was performed to investigate how to best improve communication among nurses and providers to reduce error and improve client satisfaction. This resulted in the proposal of an evidence based intervention. The purpose of this evidence based project was to assess the impact of SBAR and Assertiveness Training (AT) as an intervention for improving poor communication among health care staff at a skilled nursing facility in the southwestern United States. Ten participants completed a demographic survey, and pre/post Intensive Care Unit Nurse-Physician Questionnaire. Descriptive statistics was used to describe sample outcome variable. A two-tailed Wilcoxon signed-rank test was performed to compare pre and post communication training scores. The overall post communication training score (Mdn= 247.20) was not significantly lower than over all pre communication training score (Mdn= 260.50), V= 37.00, Z= -0.97, p= .333, p<0.05). In this group of healthcare staff (HCS), the SBAR and AT did not have a significant effect on improving poor communication. These outcomes could possibly be explained by limited sample size (N=10), and possibly small effect size. Recommendations for improving the current study include performing the SBAR and AT with a larger sample size of at least 30, and asking further questions to assess staff knowledge of the evidence.