Better Hand-Offs Goal of SBAR Communication
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement has inititated a technique to improve communication between healthcare providers concerning a patient's condition. The technique is a communication sytstem modeled after the military's SBAR strategy, which stands for Situation, Background, Assessment and Recommendation. SBAR promotes a very structured approach to communication, intended to make certain that departing shifts share key information about patients and improve patient care. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement's website includes a summary of the program, as well as sample worksheets to use in SBAR implementation. Several health care systems are experiementing with this communication tool as part of their Nurse Knowledge Exchange program that is also built into its electronic medical record system.