As part of Cooper University Health Care’s involvement in the New Jersey High Reliability Organization (HRO) Collaborative, also known as New Jersey STRONG, our goal is to train and educate staff on how to provide the best care to our patients in the safest environment.
There are six safety behaviors that align with New Jersey STRONG’s name and mission:
S – Speak Up for Safety
T – Think Critically
R – Reliably Communicate
O – On Task
N – No Harm
G – Got Your Back
Over the next several months, we will educate staff on how to apply these safety tips – and their associated error prevention tools – to real life, on-the-job situations.
R = Reliably Communicate:
The third piece of the NJ STRONG HRO safety behaviors is “Reliably Communicate,” which is all about point-to-point communications. Good communication leads to good teamwork and good decisions, so we want to be rigorous and prudent in how we send and receive information.
What should we do? Ensure that we hear things correctly and understand things accurately.
Why should we do this? To prevent wrong assumptions and misunderstandings that could cause us to make wrong decisions.
There are three error-prevention tools for this safety behavior that we will discuss during the coming months:
The first is SBAR: An outline for planning and communicating information about a patient’s condition or any other issue or problem.
- Situation – the bottom line (diagnosis, current condition, problem)
- Background – what do you know? (medical history, past tests, treatments)
- Assessment – what is happening now? (current findings, needs, concerns)
- Recommendation – what is next? (recommendation or request for plan of care)
When communicating, specifically use the words Situation, Background, Assessment, and Recommendation so that the listener knows the nature of the information you’re giving.
The SBAR can be used in clinical and non-clinical situations, orally, by phone, or in writing, such as in an email.