Communicating for Safety Standard

Intellectual disability and the Communicating for Safety Standard

The Communicating for Safety Standard recognises the importance of effective communication in health care and the essential role that communication plays in ensuring safe, coordinated and continuous care.⁵³

For people with intellectual disability and their families and supporters, there are a number of barriers to communicating for safety. These barriers include: 

• The person’s own receptive, expressive or linguistic difficulties
• The number and variety of professionals and services involved in their support. 

These situations may increase the risk of communication failures and subsequent inadequate or poor documentation of clinical information that can result in errors, misdiagnosis, inappropriate treatment and poor healthcare outcomes.