Communication In Healthcare Sector

Case study

Discuss about the Communication In Healthcare Sector.

Communication is one of the key factor hat is very much essential in healthcare sector for effective treatment of patients. This communication is important not only between the patient and healthcare staffs but also among the different healthcare professionals (Kings et al. 2013). This is essential to assure that a smooth flow of work takes place in healthcare along with maintenance of a culture of safety and also high quality service to students. Improper consequences may lead to adverse effects (Whitehead et al. 2015). The assignment will help to portray a similar case where a hospital faced adverse effects of improper communication. Literature search are done to identify the consequences of ineffective communication and proposed recommendation to overcome them.

The healthcare centre had urgently appointed a developmental manager in their organisation in order to handle the crisis period that the centre was going thorough. It was seen that the complain cell was being overloaded with complains that mainly depicted patients’ and their family members regarding the safety of the patients. The main cause of concern was found that the patients and their family members were poorly communicated about the patient’s health. The healthcare professionals also did not mention important facts and information about the patient to their family members. When asked, they were seen to answer their concern wither in very short conversation and also in difficult languages which ultimately did not satisfy the patients as well as their family members. Moreover, the patients also complained that they were not properly educated about their health issues, the interventions taken and many other administrative criteria of the hospitals. Moreover, they also did not communicate properly with the patients during their stays at the hospitals which made them nervous and restless. Moreover, it was also seen that not only communication was poor among the patients and the healthcare staffs but the situation was similar among the professionals as well. Inappropriate communication was found among the doctors, nurses, technician and the administrators which often hampered the smooth flow of the regular activities of the healthcare centre. It was also found that a continuous blame game was present in the regular busy periods as no one shared proper relationship with each other in the workplace. All these had resulted in the development of a tensed situation in the hospital as large numbers of negative incidents are taking places. Besides, huge number of patient complaints, there has been also increase in number of legal cases against the organisation which had really degrades the reputation of the organisation. Hence, it is extremely important to handle the patient situation and deal with it properly to overcome the present situation of crisis.

Search strategy

Some of the best databases which are searched on the present topic of discussion are pubmed, medline, cinalh, proquest , Google scholars and others. The inclusion criteria were that all the papers should be within the past 5 years and the exclusion criteria was that all papers others than English language were excluded. The keywords used were ‘effects of poor communication’, ‘consequences of poor communication in healthcare’, ‘patient-provider communication’, communication among healthcare staffs, strategies for better communication in healthcare and others.

Effective communication is considered by researchers to share a strong positive association with the patient safety and easy flow of work in the healthcare wards. It is very much important in providing top quality care for the patient. It helps in overcoming complexes among different healthcare centres which they develop mainly due to the system of power play (Laschinger et al. 2014). Any breakdown in the process of effective communication often results in adverse events which may even be life threatening for many patients. Moreover improper communications can land the healthcare professionals in legal battle which affect their practices and career.

Researchers usually find two types of communication mediums in the healthcare centres. The first one is the professional – professional communication breakdowns. This is often stated by the researchers to bring down adverse effects like miscommunication about the patient’s condition, poor documentation as well as failure to read the medical records of the patient.

Not only that improper communication result in hurting the self respect and self esteem of the patient as they are not made to know their own health conditions properly. This often lead to breaches in the principles of autonomy and dignity which against result in ethical breaches (Liau et al., 2014). Inadequate informed consent is also measured by many researchers to be one of the most harmful aspects of profession – patient communication is inadequate informed consent which leads to overlooking the rules of the principles of autonomy and dignity. Many researchers have also shown that it is indeed very important for nurses to develop therapeutic relationship with the patients so that best outcomes could be achieved. Communication is the most important aspect for development of such relation. However, unsympathetic response to patients complains have negative effect on the patient for which they may feel neglected. Thus tensions develop between both the stakeholders which care many complicacies in the treatment of the patients. Moreover effective communication is also very important for nurses to properly educate patients about their conditions and the different interventions that they need to take for self care and self management (Kurt et al. 2016). Inadequate education provided to the patient about medication due to improper communication is harmful for the patient and may result in hospital readmissions as the patient may not be able to follow the correct procedure and lead to adverse results. Poor communication may also deprive the patient to know each and every detail of the interventions and treatment plan of the nurses. They may not be able to know all the details about heir disorders that they need to know. They may also perceive wrong information due to the inappropriate way of communicating like using of scientific terms and jargons. These should be avoided by professionals in order to make the patient literate completely about their health. Often miscommunication due to language barrier also takes place (Ratanowgsa et al. 2013). Proper communication while handling patient with different cultures are important to provide culturally competent care. Poor communication with them may breach their cultural ethic which may harm their sentiments and lead to poor quality service. These ultimately result in poor service delivery to the patients and the quality of care is also compromised which ultimately affects the reputation of the healthcare centres. This in turn makes the healthcare lose its profitability that affects the overall financial health of the organisation and in turn poor resource allocation to staffs. In this way poor communication can affect the foundation of the entire healthcare centres (Lancaster et al. 2015).

Research evidence

Coming to another genre of discussion is the consequences of poor communication among the different healthcare professionals. The first consequences of improper communication among the providers are medication errors. Often documentation that includes symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, care plan and medication, problems, risks and health safety information are not handed properly to the delegates or other nurses who are working in teams which leads to handling patient in an unethical way by different members of the same team. This not only confuses the team members but also interrupts the quality service which the patient needs to get from the team members (Reader, Gillespie and Roberts 2014). Often different members of the team must be informed about each and every changes in the documents by diagnosing the patient in every interval so that every members are aware of their next steps and how different medication need to be provided in correct dose and correct route. Secondly, inappropriate communication among the administrations and the health workers often result in long waiting times for the patients. Due to improper communication, proper managements are not made while fixing appointments, allotting doctors for shifts, appointing more number of patients than the doctors can provide time to, improper date and time given to patients and others all lead to accumulation of more number of patients and also they have to wait offer a larger time. Also improper communication between the nurses results in long waiting time for the patients either for their meal, medication, pain management and others (Paddison et al. 2015). Thirdly, it is also seen that miscommunication or poor communication among the nurses and other healthcare staffs often arise from power struggles , different complexes, lack of confidence and many others. Disagreements as well as differences of the opinions take place among the nurses which can result in occurrences of serious conflicts as well as blame games in the workplace. Improper communication results in misunderstandings and additional development of ideas about each other which may not exist in reality. Hence communication should be done on a wide scale to resolve the issue and ensure proper workplace culture and safety. Fourthly, sometimes poor decision making also result from improper communication among the different healthcare professionals as the individuals taking the decision may not have all the details need to make correct and rational decision regarding a patient care plan necessities (King and Hoppe, 2013). There are four important section that every healthcare professionals need to undertake to make a correct decision regarding the patient – the problem of the patient, possible solution, alternative and consequences and strengths and awareness. Researches show that the better the four aspects discussed among team members, there is high chance of successful outcome of the treatment (O’Halloron et al. 2015). Often lack of information, a planned procedure with the team members, different decisions taken by different members according to their own rationale and other all lead to improper decision remaining for a patient that affect the health of the patient. Fifthly, miscommunication and poor communications all lead to increased stress among the healthcare professionals due to unnecessary worry as well as concern over the workplace issues despite whether the issues are real or perceived.

Consequences of poor communication among healthcare professionals

Hence form the above mentioned disadvantages of the poor communication and miscommunication among the provider-provider and also the provide-patient results in negative outcomes for the patient as well as destruction of the reputation of the organisation. Hence proper method for influencing proper communication among the stakeholders must be introduced by the management systems so that severe negative effects can be avoided (Aggarwal et al. 2015).

One of the best recommendations to resolve the issue of communication provided by the researchers are the appointments of experienced leaders in the fields of nursing, administration, financial departments, customer care departments and others. Leaders with their effective styles of leadership will help in development of an unity within the team with the proper establishments o environment which besides being competitive will also help the nurse to appreciate each other’s work and also give scope to each other for mode development of skill and knowledge. The leaders will invite feedbacks form each of the members regarding their connection with the patients and also with their tem members and accordingly will try to solve the issues of the members respectively (Curtis et al. 2016). All these would include satisfaction of the profession of the healthcare professionals and their stress level would reduce. As professionals become comfortable with their colleagues, issues like improper decision making blame games and others will eventually lessen. Better the leadership better will be the quality development of the team members and hence better will be the patient satisfaction.

Another important recommendation would be to conduct weekly training classes where trainers would help the healthcare professionals to learn the minute basics of proper communication. Different effective methods of communication like proper listening, proper speaking, feedback giving skills, feedback receiving skills, correct body language, effective participation in team meetings and others all ensure that professionals have an idea about communication models and how to apply them (Martin et al. 2013). Moreover, the trainer also needs to discuss the different ways about how healthcare staff can develop communication with patients by introduction of guideline in the training classes and also by discussing the important methods of communication with patients. The correct ethics of communication should be taught to the professionals.

For the first few months, after the introduction of the interventions a monitoring body should be introduced whose main work would be to monitor each and every work of the professionals in every field of the healthcare and report their observations. This would be made in to a report and this evaluation report would then be against introduced to the quality development management so that further modifications are done according the results of the effective training and leaderships on the professionals (Khamisa et al. 2015).

On the administrative basis, the managers as well as other administrators should routinely conduct meetings so that they can communicate with each other regrading the different issues faced by the healthcare professionals in different domains, financial resources, outpatient meetings and arrangements, allocation of proper nurse patient ratio and others (Bays et al. 2014). When effective communications among the managers and administrations are done properly, there remains less scope of confusion on the work floor as resources remain ready, proper workforce is found on the floor, less commotion is seen and smooth flow of work is carried.

Conclusion:

One of the most important factors that lead to compromised patient quality and also a tensed environment among the healthcare professionals are poor communication. Poor communication between healthcare professional lead to issues like medication errors, long waiting times, improper decision making workplace conflicts, increased stress and others. Improper patient –provider communication leads to legal an ethical consequence where the patients are not communicated about their disorders and ailments, the interventions provided. Their autonomy and dignity are also snot maintained which harm their self respect. Moreover they face long waiting times that reduce the quality of service. Patients and family suffer from anxiety which leads to further deterioration of health; Moreover communication required for patient education is also not conducted properly. In these situation, training sessions, effective leadership, monitoring body, administration board all lead to betterment of communication and positive outcomes.

References:

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