Ineffective Communication in Healthcare: A Detailed Report

This report addresses the critical issue of ineffective communication within healthcare settings, identifying it as a primary cause of patient suffering and negative outcomes. The report examines the impact of poor communication on patients, highlighting issues such as lack of informed consent, unanswered queries, and medication errors. The stakeholders are identified, with a focus on the patients who bear the brunt of these communication failures. The root causes are explored, pinpointing lack of knowledge among nurses and power struggles between junior and senior staff. The report proposes a plan to improve communication through training sessions, feedback sessions, and organizational culture changes. It outlines a detailed 'Plan, Do, Study, Act' (PDSA) methodology, including evaluation methods to assess the effectiveness of the initiatives and ensure the achievement of improved patient care and satisfaction.

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Identification of the problem:
Ineffective communication is the main issue that had resulted many patients to go
through severe levels of suffering in the healthcare organisation. Many of the family members of
patients had complained that the patients were not asked for informed consents, their queries and
concerns were not answered and they were not given proper education about maintenance of
interventions. Ineffective communication was not only found between the service users and the
providers but also among the professionals as well. There were sequences of medication error,
improper delegation, long waiting times for patients as well. Lack of effective communication
made the patients anxious as well as fearful, as they could not understand anything about the
treatment plans that were taken for them. All these resulted in suffering of the patients with
longer stays at the hospital, readmission of the hospitals even after discharge, lack of idea about
how to modify their lifestyles and many others. All such affected the reputation of the hospital
that increased the risk of potential loss of consumer base and hence lack of profits.
Identification of the stakeholder:
From the ineffective communication scenarios that take place between the patient and
providers and among the providers, the patients are the main stakeholders who remain exposed
to higher levels of risks. The patients are the only stakeholders who have to face severe
consequences due to infective communication with the professionals as well as that among the
professionals (Blais, 2015). Providers who do not know about the proper ways of communicating
with the patients or are unaware of the importance of effective therapeutic communication can
affect the patients in different ways. They may take inadequate informed consent that might
harm the dignity and autonomy of the patient. This might make them feel depressed as they feel

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that their self-esteem is hurt. They feel that providers do not respect and therefore they fail to
comply with the interventions set by the professionals. Ineffective therapeutic communication
takes place, as the professionals cannot ensure empathy and compassion in their interactive
sessions. Such unsympathetic response during times of patients’ complaints, queries and
concerns affect their morale and they feel uncared and unloved. These have negative impacts on
the health outcomes (Koukouta 7 Papathinasiou, 2014). Moreover, improper communication
between the professionals makes the patients suffer due to medication error, missing of important
facts during delegation, longer waiting times of patients and many others. All these result in poor
quality care of patients that affect the patients emotionally, mentally and physically. As the
patients face all these issues only, therefore they are the most important stakeholder identified.
Root cause of the problem:
After taking extensive research to find out the main root cause of the problem, it was seen
that two important reasons contributed to ineffective communication in the healthcare centres.
The first identified issue is the lack of proper knowledge among the nurses who are working on
the floor. They believe that only having clinical expertise is enough to bring out the best
treatment plan for caring of the patients. Recent day researchers are of the opinion that effective
communication is an important attribute that has the capacity to develop therapeutic relationship
between service users and service providers (O’Hagan et al., 2014). Patients tend to develop trust
and bond with nurses with effective communication skills and these have positive outcomes on
health of patients. Therefore, this knowledge was lacking in the professionals that resulted them
to fail miserably to communicate with the patients effectively. The second root cause was the
power struggle among the junior and senior nurses. They suffered from complexes and therefore
they did not communicate with each other sufficiently. Therefore, junior nurses could not get

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guidance from senior nurses when they required help or when they felt confused about
medication or treatment procedures (Jensen et al., 2015). On the other hand, senior nurses did not
communicate with junior nurses and therefore suffered from huge work burden that took away
their energy to communicate freely with patients. Hence, all these were found to be the root
cause of ineffective communication.
Planned improvement:
From the above discussion, it became extremely important for the healthcare authorities
or the nursing managers to take active initiatives to solve the issues and develop a proper
organisational culture.
Plan: Initiatives should be taken for arranging training sessions for both the junior nurses and
senior nurses where trained professionals would describe the skills they need to posses,
importance of developing the skills in clinical settings, and disadvantage of conflicts among
professionals. In order to develop relationships among nurses, constructive feedback sessions
were arranged everyday for one hour where nurses needed to interact with each other and
provide constructive feedback (Pound & Jensen, 2018). These ensured maintenance of
transparency and overcoming of complexes.
Do: the healthcare authorities need to be approached so that they can understand the benefits of
the planned programs. They would provide financial help that would in turn allow allocation of
trained professionals who would be guiding the nurses. The nurse leaders would be approached.
They would be requested to hold the feedback sessions of junior and senior nurses. They should
be also requested to provide ideas and uptake activities that would ensure better communication
and relationship development among the professionals (Chan & Psy, 2016).

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Study: the reports can be provided by the trainers which can then be used in order to analyse
whether the nursing professionals are developing communication skills or not. Besides, reports
that would be prepared by the trainers, the nursing leaders would also develop reports about how
the professionals are faring in the meetings and how eel they are moving towards the success of
the goals and objectives set (Chu et al., 2018).
Act methodology: as the initiatives that are planned can be implemented successfully and can
help in development of communication among the nurses and also among the patients, they can
be implemented in the clinical setting. The training sessions would be conducted twice a week
for two hours after shift. The feedback sessions would be conducted everyday for one hour.
Evaluate the effectiveness of your actions/improvement initiative:
Questionnaires would be developed for the patients about the effective communication
that they are having with the professionals. More the positive results of the questionnaires and
lesser the number of complaints in the complaints departments, it can be well understood that the
initiatives are helping to meet the goals. Another questionnaire would be developed to
understand the feelings of nurses and to find out power struggles still exists or not. The
evaluation committee would be also observing the feedback session to develop cues and ideas
about the success of the feedback sessions (Doherty et al., 2016). All these would help to make
sure that the planned initiatives are aligning with the objectives or require further modifications
for getting successful results.

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References:
Blais, K. (2015). Professional nursing practice: Concepts and perspectives. Pearson.
Chan, J. C. Y., & Sy, P. Y. (2016). The relationships among personality, intercultural
communication, and cultural self-efficacy in nursing students. Journal of Nursing
Research, 24(4), 286-290.
Chu, C. H., Sorin-Peters, R., Sidani, S., De La Huerta, B., & McGilton, K. S. (2018). An
Interprofessional Communication Training Program to Improve Nurses’ Ability to
Communicate With Stroke Patients With Communication Disorders. Rehabilitation
Nursing Journal.
Doherty, C., Landry, H., Pate, B., & Reid, H. (2016). Impact of Communication Competency
Training on Nursing Students’ Self-advocacy Skills. Nurse educator, 41(5), 252-255.
Jensen, L. R., Løvholt, A. P., Sørensen, I. R., Blüdnikow, A. M., Iversen, H. K., Hougaard, A., ...
& Forchhammer, H. B. (2015). Implementation of supported conversation for
communication between nursing staff and in-hospital patients with
aphasia. Aphasiology, 29(1), 57-80.
Kourkouta, L., & Papathanasiou, I. V. (2014). Communication in nursing practice. Materia
socio-medica, 26(1), 65.
O'hagan, S., Manias, E., Elder, C., Pill, J., Woodward‐Kron, R., McNamara, T., ... & McColl, G.
(2014). What counts as effective communication in nursing? Evidence from nurse
educators' and clinicians' feedback on nurse interactions with simulated patients. Journal
of advanced nursing, 70(6), 1344-1355.

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Pound, C., & Jensen, L. R. (2018). Humanising communication between nursing staff and
patients with aphasia: Potential contributions of the humanisation values
framework. Aphasiology.