Effective Communication Strategies in Health and Social Care Module

This essay provides a comprehensive overview of effective communication strategies within the health and social care sector, examining both verbal and non-verbal communication methods. It highlights the importance of clear, concise, and complete messaging, while also addressing potential co...Read More

Bsc(Hons )
Health and Social
Care
Module 4000
Communication and
information
technology

Module guide
Essay
Contents

INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY..................................................................................................................................................4
CONCLSUION...............................................................................................................................................6
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................................6
INTRODUCTION
To make people understand and to understand the other people communication is very
necessary. Communication is a process in which one person (sender) forms some message and
get it deliver to other person (receiver) through a medium. The medium could be anything,
verbal or non verbal. Verbal communication includes the oral and written communication.
Whereas non verbal communication is the paralanguages, body language, expressions, gestures
and etc. To make the message fully understood by the receiver, then sender should form it with
more clarity and preciseness. Communication is an important part in an individual everyday part.
This report discusses about the effective communication strategies, features of effective
communication and the barriers which come in between the communication process. The types
or purposes of communication have also been talked in this essay along with the use of

Information technology in enhancing the communication process. It is going to include theories
of communication and their applicability to a health and social Care setting and their weaknesses
and strengths. Apart from this the essay also includes importance of effective communication in
personal and professional life.
MAIN BODY
Communication is always been a major part in every people life. Through
communication they tend to exchange their thoughts and ideas with each other. To deliver the
communication right, it has to be effective. The features of effective communication include,
Correctness in which the message form by the sender and the intention associated with it are
correctly understood by the receiver and also the receiver gives the feedback very correctly
because he has understood the true meaning for the message. Completeness is yet another feature
which refers to the complete and clear communication. The message which has been draft by the
sender should be complete with all information; otherwise incomplete messages can create
confusions and misunderstanding between the beings (Aalberg and et al., 2016). The
communication done should consider the background of the audience or the receiver to which the
communication has been made, this would help in forming the message carefully and
consciously; therefore the effective communication should do consideration. The message which
is formed should also be clear. The words which have been used in drafting the message should
help in giving the clear meaning for the message. To make a message or any communication
clear, it should be short, precise and straight. Otherwise the vague message can get delivered to
the receivers. The other features of effective communication include Courtesy, concreteness, and
conciseness. And to make a communication effective these above features can be used as
strategies. These features or say strategies would help an individual in making the
communication effective and successful communication.
But there are times when the communication done or sent by the sender does not get properly
understood or delivered to the receiver, there some or the other barrier which gets occur in
between (Agarwal and et al., 2018). The barriers for the communication may include Physical
barriers, it refers to the physical distance between the sender and receiver. It has been noticed
that more the distance between them more can be the chances or degree for barrier in
communication. For example the head of one department wants to communicate with the head of
other department but because their office cabins are at distance from each other they might get
failed in communicating. Personal barrier in communication can also create grievances in
between the communication. It occurs when the people who are indulging in the communication
process have some personal grievances among each other. Linguistic barriers are yet another
type of barrier in which the barrier occurs when the languages of the people who are in the
communication process are different from one another. For example the sender has sent the
message in English Language but the receiver only understands the French language. This will
result in barrier in communication (Allen, 2017). To curb this barrier the sender should translate

the message or draft the message in the language which is understood by the receiver. There are
times when the people involving in the communication process belong to different culture. From
example in one country there is holiday for Saturday but in another country it can be possible
that there is not a holiday for Saturday. So the communication done on Saturday may on get any
revert because their culture is not to work on weekends, therefore it might lead to barrier in
communication. Such type of barrier is called cultural barrier. In such cases the sender must first
understands the background and the culture from which that individual belongs, after making
that fully known about their culture the message should be draft in accordance with that. There
are also situations in which the an individual in a communication process has some issue for
mistrust and fear in another person, this will result in some barrier in communication as that
individual would not trust in the message which has draft for him. This type of grievance is
known as emotional barrier in communication.
The communication can be done through many techniques. Majorly the techniques comprises
under the head of verbal and non verbal. Verbal communication includes the communication
which is done through oral and by writing. Whereas the non verbal communication includes
expressions of face, gestures, eye contact, the voice tone of individual, degree of attention paid
by the people and the like. Some barrier in the communication can be developing in interpersonal
communication (Cao and et al., 2018). The barriers in interpersonal communication may
includes wrong use of words or languages in communication, break of trust in between the
parties, misunderstanding of words or messages, wrong method used to deliver the message,
giving threat in message to other person or abuse the another can be some example of barriers in
interpersonal communication. In such type of communication the receiver majorly gets
disinterested in giving further feedbacks to the messages.
As mentioned above, the communication is used by every person whether it is their personal or
professional life or in any sector (Jordan and Yang, 2018). One of these sectors includes Health
and Social care sector. This sector concerns about the good health and social wellbeing of
people. Here the communication serves the many purposes which includes decision making; the
decision are made effectively when it is taken by all the member then more productivity can be
seen in work. Record keeping is a means of written communication in which the records get
saved in the computer; this helps the organization in saving and sharing the information within
the organization. The purpose of communication is also to give information to the patients,
people or to the staff members. Information here may include about the roles and activities which
the staff members are suppose to do, the advices given to patients or people and the like. The
communication is also done for counseling and mentoring purpose. In this the health and social
care sector gives the counseling and mentoring to the people about their health care issues and
solutions (Sukhbaatar and Fergus, 2016). For such things it is mandatory for the people to have
the effective communication to deliver their message to other people without any barrier.
In the professional life having an effective communication is a must. They need to have
command on their oral as well as written communication. They must know how to draft a

document in a way which clearly clears the motive for the message. Developing the effective
written communication is a time taken process and to grab a command on same an individual can
perform some exercises. These exercising can be regular writing practice for drafting the various
professional documents like notice, memos etc, and reading a book which teaches a person about
the ways for drafting the documents, building up the vocabulary so that one can put the jargon or
proper words in the document.
They say that technology is the best friend of people. It helps them in getting the things done
with more accuracy and efficiency. Through the advance technology a person who is living in
one corner of country or earth can now communicate with the people or person who is living at
another corner of the earth. Technology has enabled the individual to connect with one another,
now the person can virtually see another person or place. Technological communication may
include mails, video calling and conferencing, conduction of meeting and many more.
Technology has also enabled the people in sharing and saving the information or communication
through which they would be able to take the corrective decisions.
Various theories to communication
There are various theories to communication some of them are as follows:
Authoritarian Theory: This theory suggests that the communication can be effective only when
the few people have the authority to communicate and others have the task to follow that
communication.
Advantages: The barriers taken in this type of communication is very minimum as
compared to the other methods. The communication also performed effectively.
Disadvantages: The other people feel de- motivated as they are not allowed to put their
opinions and ideas to the organisation. They takes themselves machines as they only have to
follow the order from few authoritative people.
Free press theory: This theory gives the freedom to the media people to print the opinions and
thoughts about a particular topic. The truth comes before the public when the actual freedom
provides to the media people.
Advantages: In this type of theory, the truth gets communicated to the public. The
authority to speak or communicate does not lies in the hand of few people only.
Disadvantages: There can be times when the media only focuses or shows only one side
of the story and does not gives the information about the another side of the situation. This may
hamper the perspectives of the general public.
CONCLSUION
The essay presented above, discuss about the features of effective communication which
may include correctness, clearness, consideration, consciousness and etc. These features can be

used as the strategies for making the communication process effective. The barrier to
communication may include physical barriers, cultural barrier, language barrier and etc. The
technology is playing the major role in performing the communication in more effective way as
it has enable the distance communication within a seconds through emails, video conferencing
and meeting and etc. Apart from this the different theories of communication has also be
presented in the report. Some of the theories may include free press theory, authoritarian theory
and much more.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Aalberg, T., and et al., 2016. Populist political communication in Europe. Routledge.
Agarwal, N., and et al., 2018. cpsgd: Communication-efficient and differentially-private
distributed sgd. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 7564-
7575).
Allen, M. ed., 2017. The SAGE encyclopedia of communication research methods. Sage
Publications.
Cao, K., and et al., 2018. Emergent communication through negotiation.arXiv preprint
arXiv:1804.03980.
Jordan, M .I., Lee, J. hbnnnnD. and Yang, Y., 2018. Communication-efficient distributed
statistical inference. Journal of the American Statistical Association.
Sukhbaatar, S. and Fergus, R., 2016. Learning multiagent communication with backpropagation.
In Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 2244-2252).