Question

Discuss the extent of the ineffective communication of critical information during clinical handovers, the causative factors and outline potential solutions.

Answer 1

Communication refers to exchanging information with the help of different mediums, such as speaking, writing, or body language. It is of great importance in the field of medicine. Effective physician-patient communication is vital as it is related to favorable health outcomes such as increased patient satisfaction, compliance and overall health status.

Better communication can reduce medical errors and patient injury⁴. Poor communication can result in various negative outcomes, such as:

• Medical errors: Mistakes often occur when there's a breakdown in information sharing among the medical staff involved in a patients' treatment. Proper documentation is of course, important. Still, the data also needs to be distributed to the entire team on time, so errors can be identified and corrected before adverse medical events happen.
• Wrong, delayed, or expensive treatment: As a healthcare provider, one of your topmost priorities is to eliminate liabilities. When your patients undergo improper treatment, face procedural delays, or receive an incorrect medication, you end up facing severe financial and reputational consequences.
• Lack of outreach to elderly patients or critical patient: Effective communication is a vital driver of the healthcare experience, especially, when healthcare providers are dealing with isolated individuals who do not maintain consistent contact with family and friends. Lack of communication could result in neglecting health issues in these elderly individuals.
• Uninformed recommendations: Patient data is crucial information that needs to be managed carefully by healthcare providers. If inconsistently shared among your staff, patients may not receive the most appropriate treatment recommendations. In turn, it could prevent physicians from making the right decisions.
• Improper handling of private medical data: Incubating a culture of data privacy is a boardroom mandate for healthcare organizations. As healthcare technologies continue to evolve, the threat of security lapses grows too. Without effectively integrating the Electronic Health Records (EHR) into your systems, your patient data is at risk of getting exposed.

• Lack of collaboration and poor teamwork If communication in the workplace is poor and ineffective, staff members are less likely inclined to collaborate with each other. This then results in poor teamwork and potentially, even friction amongst employees. This would be extremely unfortunate for the patient as he is not able to get pateint centered care due to conflict among healthcare workers.

• Decrease in morale and engagement When communication is ineffective, it can result in decrease in employee morale and engagement. After all, why would staff members want to commit to a company and to colleagues they can’t trust or rely on?

• leads to crucial state of patient: miscommunication, wrong data handover, or miss to communicate important reports, findings, of client all can lead more serious complication in client's condition.

• Poor communication between nurses and other health care providers can have a significant negative effect on patient safety, quality of care, patient outcomes, and patient as well as staff satisfaction.

• Long Wait Times for Patients One of the most common complaints from patients about going to the doctor is long wait times. This is generally caused by a lack of communication among staff and poor scheduling.

  There will be times when your office falls behind schedule due to situations out of your control. But the worst thing you can do is not properly communicate to your patients about the wait time.

here are all common problems that occur as a ineffective communication:

The most common provider-to-provider communication breakdowns were:

• miscommunication about the patient’s condition
• poor documentation, and
• failure to read the patient’s medical record.

And common provider-to-patient communication issues involved:

• inadequate informed consent
• unsympathetic response to a patient’s complaint
• inadequate education (such as about medications)
• incomplete follow-up instructions
• no or wrong information given to patient, and
• miscommunication due to language barrier.

​​​​​​​