Analysis of Communication Barriers in Hospital Settings: Report

This report delves into the critical issue of communication barriers within hospital settings and their impact on patient care and safety. It meticulously examines various obstacles, including clinical, organizational, and financial barriers that impede collaborative care, leading to potential medication errors. The report highlights the significance of workplace dynamics, particularly the impact of incivility and disruptive behaviors on staff performance and adherence to best practices. It thoroughly analyzes the causes of prescription errors, emphasizing the role of inadequate knowledge and the importance of teamwork in mitigating these errors. Furthermore, it discusses the prevention of slips and lapses through vigilant prescription checks and adherence to IT rules and organizational guidelines. The report also proposes measures to enhance verbal communication among staff, emphasizing the need for clear protocols and mechanisms to ensure the validity and authenticity of prescriptions. Overall, the report underscores the imperative of effective communication to improve patient outcomes and foster a safer healthcare environment.

IMPROVING
COMMUNICATION IN
HOSPITAL STAFFS

Hindrances to a collaborative care
 Patient-centred care of a disease is characterized by the distinctive services
like patient education, staff knowledge and providing psychosocial –
behavioural services to manage a case holistically. There are certain
barriers though, to a collaborative practise :-
 Clinical barriers interfere with the patient treatment and medication
adherence and it results from provider knowledge lack of treatment
guidelines and inability to distinguish between signs and symptoms.
 Organizational barriers to implement a collaborative care include the
system-level hindrances(obstacles)to care delivery.
 Financial barriers are prominent that blocks collaborative care due to lack
of funding and also reimbursement issues.

Workplace environment
 A society call for human interactions and that’s what a ‘society’ is about.
 These interactions are prone to become uncivil and behaviour to become
disruptive especially in a high strung workplace environment like hospital.
 This hinders individual performance and organizational succeed. Degree
of incivility, disruptive behaviour severity and the response to these
disruptions - all together control the workplace’s social dynamics and
adherence to evidence based practises.

Medication prescription
errors
 Medication prescription error is described as an error at any step in the
pathway which begins with a clinician prescribing any medication and it
ends with the patient receiving the prescribed medication.
 Adverse drug event is defined as a harm done to patient due to the
medication.

Causes of prescription
errors
 The cardinal problem is prescribing a drug without even realising or
knowing about the contraindication, allergy and the special caution.
 Lack of knowledge about a medicine and how it would be prescribed are
primary causes.
 Something that can dissolve the error like teamwork as if any one else in
the team can spot the ‘problem’ and rectify it – are occluded due to
deficiency in collaborative areas.

Slips and Lapses by staffs
 Slips, lapses occurs when prescribing a drug.
 Knowledge-based mistakes are doubled by slips, lapses and lapses which
can result in patients receiving a different hazardous medication.

Important staff behaviour
Slips and lapses can be prevented by:
a. Check of prescriptions before another staff signs them.
b. Having a low threshold of double checking side effects and indications
before applying the high-risk medications.

Adherence to IT rules
 The staffs of different teams, disciplines
and department should adhere and
comply with newly made IT rules
concerning with medication prescription
errors.
 Adherence to organisational guidelines is
as important as best clinical practices
and both should be done simultaneously
– to bring a practise change.

Enhancing verbal communication amongst
staffs
 Verbal communication in prescription orders must be limited to emergency
and critical situations where written or electronic communication is not
feasible.
 Providing a mechanism that ensures validity and authenticity of prescriber.
 Describing the situations for which verbal orders can be used.
 Listing and defining the individuals involved with sending and receiving
of verbal orders.