The Importance of Communication in Safety

At its most basic level, communication is the exchange of ideas or feelings between people. This exchange consists of 55 percent body language, 38 percent voice tone and 7 percent verbal words, according to studies cited by Grey Owl Aviation Consultants Inc. Some circumstances, however, particularly in the workplace, can impede effective communication and lead to such calamities as patient injury, aircraft failure and employee accidents.

Patient Safety

• According to a 2004 report from M. Leonard et al., problems with communication are the foremost cause of accidental patient harm in medicine. Factors like limited human memory, stress and fatigue all contribute to clinicians' performance. Despite this, traditional measures of patient safety have concerned only practitioner performance, while assuming effective communication. Practitioners must implement standardized communication tools to further improve patient care. One such tool, known as SBAR, provides a structured way for nearly all clinical departments to rapidly and effectively communicate. SBAR is an acronym for Situation, Background, Assessment and Recommendation; these four words provide practitioners with the means to convey basic information in a critical patient event.

Aircraft Maintenance

• Grey Owl Aviation Consultants Inc. reports that human factors impact the judgment of an aircraft mechanic every day. Among such factors is communication, identified as the potential leading cause of most aviation accidents. Specifically, communication deficiencies can lead to airline workers lacking the instructions to complete a task or simply assuming a job is finished when it is not. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the study of a 1991 EMB-120 airline crash revealed incomplete work reports and failure of inspectors to finish maintenance and turnover forms. Airliners must establish and enforce standards concerning oral and written communications.

Workplace Safety

• Investigations of work-related accidents usually home in on a person to blame rather than considering the event as a whole. This bias is the result of two factors: safety climate, which dictates those employee behaviors expected in a particular environment, and safety communication. When safety climate is positive, workers are more likely to freely discuss workplace errors and concerns. These items include the potential for and cause of accidents. Closed communication channels, however, mean work-related accidents are generally investigated without regard for internal and external causes. Thus, in order to accurately identify workplace hazards and then correctly attribute accidents, open communication is key.

Food Safety

• According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, information of and opinions on food risks must be effectively communicated to ensure food safety as a whole. Food safety entails the development of international food standards, management of foodborne disease outbreaks and programs concerning food production and handling. Even when risks in these areas are perceived rather than substantiated, interested parties are expected to freely express their thoughts. This allows the risk assessment process to begin, by which officials identify food risks and characterize the best tools for managing them. In addition to providing all relevant information and data to interested parties, communication is used to express concepts and concerns in comprehensible terms for the public audience.