Communicating With Physicians: How Agencies Can Be Heard

Communication failure plays an important role in medical errors. Clinical communication is highly complex and prone to error especially during transitions of patient care and emergent situations. Standardized approaches and tools may provide potential solutions to improve the quality of communication and prevent subsequent patient harm. Maximizing nurse—physician collaboration holds promise for improving patient care and creating satisfying work roles. The purpose of this article is to describe strategies that will facilitate effective nurse—physician collaboration. First discussed is the clinician perspective with an emphasis on a model, situation, background, assessment, recommendation (SBAR). This shared mental model is for improving communication between clinicians. This introduction is integrated with actual experiences encountered by a Texas home health agency in implementing the SBAR technique. Finally, the physician perspective is presented with discussion of communication development strategies to enhance nurse-physician collaboration and communication in a home care setting.