Poor Communication In Health Care Essay

How does poor communication impact on patient safety?

Poor communication can lead to injuries and complications through miscommunications and factors that impacts on the quality of care being delivered. Reduced team cohesion which occurs with poor communication is particularly detrimental to patients with chronic conditions as they are effectively treated with different health care professionals. An example of this are several deaths due to “unsafe discharges” caused by poor communication during handover (Royal College of Nursing Great Britain, 2014). Through effective communication the disease’s effects can be reduced through a quick response to a deteriorating patient and efficiently provide co-ordinated care to provide the correct treatment

G., O 'Brien, K., & Saha, S, 2016). Poor communication can also lead to mistrust of medical professionals as the patient may not understand what is occurring, leading to nonadherence to medical care and thus impacting on patient safety (Cuevas, A. G., O 'Brien, K., & Saha, S, 2016).

What barriers to effective communication are described?

Communication is effected by a mixture of variables such as an “authority gradient”, style of communication and fatigue which impacts the way information is communicated between people. These factors can form a barrier called the “authority gradient” where individuals are classified on factors such as level of education, gender or job position which determines how much control they have over a situation. An example of this is the perceived notion that doctors are higher on the health care hierarchy than nurses, which can cause problems when a nurse does not feel comfortable communicating information to a doctor even when it benefits the patient. An example of the effect of the authority gradient is the study by Pierre, Scholler, Strembski and Breuer (2012), that when doctors and nurses were