Ineffective or insufficient communication among team members is a major contributing factor to adverse events in healthcare as revealed by a growing body of literature on safety and error prevention.  Patient harm, increase length of stay and ineffective resource use are some of the results of communication failures in acute settings.

Ente and colleagues found that 75% of African healthcare professionals believed that adverse events were mistakes made by individual practitioners leading to personal guilt, depression, and remorse (Ente, Oyewumi, & Mpora, 2010). Fear of blame, prosecution, and even imprisonment for medical errors may impede the reporting of patient harm in African healthcare settings as in other countries (Barach & Small, 2002). This fear of reporting further complicates the ability to collect incident reports or obtain open and transparent information concerning suspected adverse events.

Patient Safety in healthcare is about Identifying what works – effective practice, Ensuring that the patient gets it ‐ appropriate use and Delivering care flawlessly – no errors. Further more, there should be no needless deaths, no needless delays, no waste, no needless pain or suffering and no helplessness.