Effective Communication in Health Care: An Annotated Bibliography

This annotated bibliography provides a comprehensive review of the literature on written communication in health care and its impact on patient safety, workload, and satisfaction. The paper highlights the negative outcomes of poor communication and provides practical recommendations to improve communication strategies. The article concludes that a structured approach, proper training, and the use of electronic documentation and follow-up tools are required to improve communication in health care.

Running head: ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author’s note

1ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Effective communication in health care
Vermeir, P., Vandijck, D., Degroote, S., Peleman, R., Verhaeghe, R., Mortier, E., ... &
Vogelaers, D. (2015). Communication in healthcare: a narrative review of the literature
and practical recommendations. International journal of clinical practice, 69(11), 1257-1267.
Communication in the field of health care is an essential tool to provide a comprehensive
and safe care to the patient and to improve the patient satisfaction. Communication in health care
is related to less medical errors, less hospital readmissions and less number of mortalities and
morbidities. There are two types of communications that are prevalent between the health care
professionals and the patients. The written communication has largely been used as an effective
means of communication between the primary and the specialized care. This paper has carried
out a literature review in order to evaluate the quality of the written communication and the
outcome of the communication inefficiencies and the possible recommendations.
69 articles were selected after a database search involving Pub Med, Web of Science and
The Cochrane Library. The MESH terms such as primary health care, patient safety, nurse-
patient communication was taken in the inclusion criteria.
It has been found that poor communication has lead to increase in the workload as it
would lessen the confidence in the decisions. The author have stated that although face to face
communication is important for getting the full conversation, but patients tend to forget what
they are told. Written communication can be of advantages as it can be used for future references
and also bear medico-legal values.
It has been found that poor communication has brought about many negative outcomes such as
compromise of the safety of the patient, inefficient use of the valuable resources, discontinuity of

2ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
care, dissatisfaction in patients and economic consequences due to withdrawal of patients from
the hospital settings.
Strengths and limitations
The strengths of this paper is that it provides a comprehensive knowledge regarding
written communication in health care. In order to screen the articles for the review a large
number of articles were taken in to consideration. Hence it had been difficult to choose the
articles.
Conclusions and recommendations
In recent years the health care of the country is taking a shift and hence require effective
communication to cope up with the demanding health care. The most surprising thing is that in
spite of the advancement of the technologies such as scientific information exchange, still there
had been medical errors, malpractices and breaching of the professional standards. It is evident
there needed a clear need of structured approach, such as un-delayed referrals timeliness, greater
use of electronic documentations, greater use of telephone surveys, secretarial support. Process
indicators and follow tools are required for measuring the quality improvement initiatives.
Proper training to the health care professionals would also help in improving the communication
strategies.

3ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
References
Vermeir, P., Vandijck, D., Degroote, S., Peleman, R., Verhaeghe, R., Mortier, E., ... &
Vogelaers, D. (2015). Communication in healthcare: a narrative review of the literature and
practical recommendations. International journal of clinical practice, 69(11), 1257-1267.