“SACCIA Safe Communication”: Five core competencies for safe and high-quality care

Abstract

Background: Communication has emerged as a critical component in delivering safe, high-quality care. The evidence is clear that health outcomes are enhanced when clinicians communicate well, and compromised when they interact poorly. It is important to understand the core aspects of interpersonal sense-making that hinder or foster favorable health outcomes. This study introduces an evidence-based "SACCIA Safe Communication" (Sufficiency, Accuracy, Clarity, Contextualization, Interpersonal Adaptation) framework to fill this gap. Method: Sixty narratives of patient safety events were coded using qualitative content analysis guided by the "Hannawa SACCIA Safe Communication" framework. Results: The analyses yielded 367 communication errors. Of these errors, 160 related to unsafe encoding, 92 to unsafe decoding, and 115 to unsafe transactional communication. Sufficiency errors were most frequent (124), followed by communication errors of contextualization (117), accuracy (84), interpersonal adaptation (26), and clarity (16). Conclusions: The Hannawa SACCIA Safe Communication framework identifies interpersonal communication processes that commonly compromise the safety and quality of care. Narrative excerpts from the cases in this study exemplify what these processes look like in daily care encounters. The framework bridges across contexts and interpersonal settings. Furthermore, it explains various types of patient safety events (e.g. patient falls; unsafe handoffs or surgeries; diagnostic and medication errors). Therefore, it serves as a useful approach to describe and understand interpersonal communication as a critical factor in the provision of safe and high-quality care.

Dispatcher-assisted cardiopulmonary resuscitation for paediatric out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: A structured evaluation of communication issues using the SACCIA® safe communication typology

“…15 Beyond identifying communication errors, the SACCIA framework further allows for an evidence-based root cause analysis that traces the reasons for such errors to seven common misassumptions about human communication. 17 These seven "SACCIA root cause principles" are defined and summarized in Table 1.…”

“…The above issues in DACPR were further classified into the seven SACCIA root cause principles of human communication, 17 ordered by their frequency of occurrence in our dataset:…”

Communication science lessons for patient safety and quality care

“…“SACCIA safe communication”) have been discussed thoroughly in previous publications and thus will not be reiterated here. 1,2,26 Instead, this current article introduces five basic precepts that substantiate these safe communication skills. The precepts identify common misperceptions that both clinicians and patients hold about communication.…”

The mind of an academic, the voice of a patient: My field experience with safe communication

“…It does not constitute or replace communication skills. Skills, like the ones we defined as “safe communication” in our scientific work, 2–4 are a prerequisite for mnemonic tools like SBAR to work safely and effectively.…”