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Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation
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Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation
SBAR stands for Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation. We can think of it as a content template.
It’s used in contexts such as the military and healthcare, where a critical problem needs to be reported quickly and efficiently. SBAR organises your thoughts, so you include all the information needed to hand the problem over to someone else for action or a decision. For example, nurses use it to hand over to the next shift.1
It began in US Navy nuclear submarines, where the consequences of miscommunication are serious. Structured communications provide a system everyone understands, and so reduces the need for confidence and skill in communicating.
They also defuse the problem of communicating across status lines. Hospitals are very hierarchical, and a junior nurse can be afraid to tell a consultant surgeon that something’s going wrong. SBAR provides an officially sanctioned process, and structures it so it doesn’t come across as just an opinion – it is argued for.
Content templates can be useful for structuring all kinds of documents, and I’ve used a similar approach with organisations whose staff have to write to individual customers.
1. Laura J Park (2020) Using the SBAR handover tool, British Journal of Nursing. 29 (14).