Communicating for safety
Communicating for safety involves the accurate and careful exchange of information about a person's care between treating clinicians, members of a multidisciplinary team, and between clinicians and patients, families and carers.
Clinical communication is known to influence quality and safety outcomes throughout the patient journey. It is an integral part of care and effective communication is essential to ensuring safe, high-quality care.
Ensuring safe and high quality clinical communication
The portal has guidance, tools and resources to support the core skills for communicating for safety.
Communicating for safety program areas
- Clinical handover
Effective clinical handover, which is structured and standardised, can improve patient safety.
- Communicating with patients and colleagues
Resources and research to support effective communication.
- Patient identification
Patient identification and the matching of a patient to an intended treatment is performed routinely in all care settings.
- Open disclosure
Open disclosure is the open discussion of incidents that result in harm to a patient while receiving health care. It is a key element of clinical governance and communicating for safety.
Clinical communications is integrated across other Commission work areas including:
- Electronic Discharge Summaries
- Shared Decision Making
- Health Literacy
- Informed consent
- Accreditation
Feedback
The Commission values your comments and feedback. If you have feedback on the portal, please send your comments to comm4safety.compcare@health.gov.au or phone (02) 9126 3600.