Effective Nursing Health Care Communication

If you want to master effective nursing health care communication, then you need to learn about the Genie named Sbar.

Health care communication can involve doctors, patients, family members, fellow nurses and other private and professional individuals. Sbar will help you when speaking with doctors, and especially when your under a lot of stress.

To put effectiveness into your health care communication, you need do nothing more than let the Genie out of the bottle.

The Genie is named Sbar.

Sbar lives in a little roundish bottle, off white in color, perhaps you could say, bone white.

Sbar is intuitive. He cannot make wishes come true but he can organize things. He can help you with your thoughts, to make them easier to use. One of his specialties is helping nurses communicate with doctors. Perhaps to be a better communicator is one of your wishes anyway.

Learning how Sbar organizes thoughts and simplifies them can help you become a more effective nursing health care communicator.

Note: The help with organization that Sbar does, while effective for communication, is not effective for nurses notes or other documented communication. Sbar only helps to effectively organize verbal communication.

SBAR and Effective Nursing Health Care Communication

How does Sbar do it, you ask? He simply uses a formula. What ever you want to communicate, he organizes the thoughts into his simple formula. In the case of nurses, his formula is designed to work so that the receiving hard wiring of the human doctor brain will more readily pick up the information.

What is his formula? It follows what you might consider to be a mind map. The way Sbar helps nurses to remember his formula is by simply remembering his name.

Each letter in the name Sbar is the key to the formula.

The S of Sbar becomes Situation.The B of Sbar becomes BackgroundThe A of Sbar becomes AssessmentThe R of Sbar becomes Recommendation

By pulling Sbar out of his bottle and letting him do his magic, it makes it possible to communicate in such a way that the most important information can be communicated. Even in the most stressful situations, pulling Sbar out of his jar will enable you to communicate straight.

Consider the mind map closer.

Situation is the first organizing principle Sbar uses to start with. He organizes thoughts to explain in the fewest words, exactly what the situation is.

Background is the second organizing principle that Sbar creates within effective communication. Often times the background helps explain the situation or how the situation came to be.

Assessment is the third organizing principle that Sbar accomplishes. This provides the basis for deciding what the final decision should be.

Recommendation is the final principle of thought organization that Sbar produces upon emerging from his bone white round bottle. Best practice and patient safety are always the ulterior motivation for effective nursing health care communication.

You have probably figured out that Sbar is within each of us.

Let Sbar out of his jar. Use his formula and communicate effectively.

The Communication Main Page looks at other aspects of communication.

Communication in Nursing and what you can do to improve your communication as a nurse.

Speaking Skill Mastery Are you a public speaking nurse? Here are some skills that will help you master public speaking.

Speechmastery.com: The Effective Nursing Communication Resource