SBAR

How to implement

Situation
Briefly describe the current situation, the specific problem, or the reason you are communicating.

Background
Provide relevant background information that is pertinent to the situation. This might include context, history, or key details.

Assessment
State your professional assessment of the situation. What do you think is happening or what is the main issue?

Recommendation
Clearly state what you recommend as the next steps or what action needs to be taken.

Example

Use SBAR to bring an urgent issue to your team’s attention.

Situation:
We’re experiencing a critical outage on our primary customer-facing application, and users are unable to access key features.

Background:
This started approximately 30 minutes ago, and our initial monitoring indicates a potential database connectivity issue. We’ve seen a spike in error reports and customer complaints are coming in.

Assessment:
Based on the error messages and the timing, I believe the primary database server might have failed or is experiencing severe performance degradation.

Recommendation:
I recommend we immediately initiate our failover procedures to switch to the backup database server. The on-call database administrator has been notified and is ready to assist.