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Northern Health Library: Standard 6: Communicating for Safety


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Fact Sheets

Both Northern Health and the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare have produced short fact sheets which provide a summary of the standard. 

Live Literature Searches

Click below to view a live literature search on PubMed on a key topic surrounding Standard 6: Communicating for Safety.

Standard 6: Communicating for Safety

This standard aims to ensure that there is effective communication between patients, carers and families, multidisciplinary teams and clinicians, and across the health service organisation, to support continuous, coordinated and safe care for patients. The new standard recognises that effective communication is needed throughout patients’ care and identifies high-risk times when effective communication is critical.

Communication is a key safety and quality issue. Health care involves a team of people: clinicians, nurses, other healthcare professionals, patients, carers and families. It is important that communication between these groups supports the delivery of continuous and safe care. Errors in communication and inadequate documentation of clinical information result in misdiagnosis, inappropriate treatment and poor care outcomes.

This standard outlines the high-risk times when health service organisations need systems and processes to support effective communication and documentation of essential information. These times include clinical handover at transitions of care, when critical information about a patient’s care emerges or changes, and when a patient must be correctly identified and matched to their intended care.

Recommended Articles

Altabbaa G, Beran TN, Clark M, Oddone Paolucci E. Improving clinical reasoning and communication during handover: An intervention study of the BRIEF-C tool. BMJ Open Qual. 2024 May 3;13(2):e002647. 

Do J, Shin S. Development of nursing handoff competency scale: a methodological study. BMC Nurs. 2024 Apr 24;23(1):272. 

Fischer P, Abendschein R, Berberich M, Grundgeiger T, Meybohm P, Smul T, Happel O. Improved recall of handover information in a simulated emergency - A randomised controlled trial. Resusc Plus. 2024 Apr 3;18:100612. 

Haysom A, Loveday WH, Ratneswaran K, Nerantzis G, Hakim N, Dineva D, Richards A. Improving availability and accuracy of the junior doctors' on-call handover through digitalisation. BMJ Open Qual. 2024 Mar 14;13(1):e002615.

Vanderzwan KJ, Kilroy S, Burt L, O'Rourke J. Don't interrupt me! development of a handoff education bundle to simulate the real world. Int J Nurs Educ Scholarsh. 2024 Mar 27;21(1).