Effective Communication Paper

Crystal McDaniel

HCS/325

Steve Fowler

In today’s health care system, delivery processes involve numerous interfaces and patient handoffs among multiple health care practitioners with varying levels of educational and occupational training. During the course of a 4-day hospital stay, a patient may interact with 50 different employees, including physicians, nurses, technicians, and others. Effective clinical practice thus involves many instances where critical information must be accurately communicated. Team collaboration is essential. When health care professionals are not communicating effectively, patient safety is at risk for several reasons: lack of critical information, misinterpretation of information, unclear orders over the telephone, and overlooked changes in status. Lack of communication creates situations where medical errors can occur.
These errors have the potential to cause severe injury or unexpected patient death. Medical errors, especially those caused by a failure to communicate, are a pervasive problem in todays health care organizations. (Michelle O’Daniel, M.H.A., M.S.G., director, member relations,
VHA West Coast)

I’ve never worked in the health care industry before so I can only give information that I’ve had heard from people, read or seen in doing research on the internet. I’ve heard that an individual will be faced with constant change in the way they communicate with others, be it a patient, doctor, or an individual across the world. In the health care field, I heard that the most used forms of communicating with people were emails and phone calls. In addition, faxing documents and records.
Effective techniques for sharing information and ideas
Out of all these forms of communication the most effective way was by phone. To most people