Professional Communication in Nursing: Ensuring Patient Safety

This essay examines the significant relationship between communication and patient safety within healthcare settings. It defines patient safety as the proactive measures taken by healthcare organizations and professionals to protect service users from harm, emphasizing the minimization of adverse events and maximization of recovery. Communication, defined as a two-way exchange of information and feelings, is highlighted as essential for ensuring safe practices. Effective communication enhances patient compliance, reduces stress and anxiety, improves self-management and psychological well-being, shortens hospital stays, and decreases post-operative complications. The essay also underscores the importance of nurses developing effective communication skills to interact with vulnerable populations and healthcare team members, thereby fostering a collaborative environment focused on achieving optimal health outcomes and quality care. Patient-safe communication is portrayed as a goal-oriented activity focused on helping patients attain optimal health outcomes.

Running head: PATIENT SAFETY AND COMMUNICATION
PATIENT SAFETY AND COMMUNICATION
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PATIENT SAFETY AND COMMUNICATION
Chapter 1: The relationship between Communication and patient safety
Patient safety can be explained as the actions that are undertaken by the healthcare
organisations and its professionals for protecting different service users from being harmed
by healthcare services. To be more specific, it ensures minimisations of the incidence as well
as impacts of the adverse events and maximise recovery from complex healthcare conditions.
In such areas, professionals can develop their communication skills in order to manage the
various complexities and compete with the various tensions that result in patient safety issues
and develop a safer workplace.
Communication can be defined as the two-way communication procedure that
involves sharing of information, feelings as well as meanings in both verbal and non-verbal
manner followed by understanding and intending the information effectively. It should be
known that effective communication not only means giving patients clear as well as
unambiguous information in a timely manner but also ensures active listening and talking
without jumping to various erroneous conclusions. Nurses need to interact with patients that
outline the rights of the patients regarding the healthcare. In this ways, they can be found to
be emphasizing that working in effective partnerships and communicating successfully will
lead to safe practices. Patients, in this regard, needs to be communicated in a manner that are
accurate, inclusive, timely as well as appropriate.
Effective communication with patients has many benefits ensuring safe practices.
Effective communication with nurses can help in increasing the compliance of the patients
with medication and even in rehabilitation programs, reduction in stress and anxiety,
development of self-management, self-esteem, mood, improvement in the pain management
as well as functional and psychological status. It also helps in reduction of the length of the
hospital stays, resolution of symptoms, decreasing the post-operative complications and

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PATIENT SAFETY AND COMMUNICATION
surgical mortality and even enhanced patient satisfaction and well-being. It also helps in
improvement of the patient safety and error reduction.
Patient-safe communication can be defined as the goal-oriented activity that can be
found to be mainly focused on helping patients in attaining optimal health outcomes. This
would include the ways by which healthcare professionals can gather and share information,
verify the acute interpretations of the information and thereby establish a procedure for
working in a collaborative manner with both the patients and others members of the
healthcare team to achieve the common goal of safe and quality care. Nurses also need to
develop effective communication skills by which they can interact with different vulnerable
cohorts in the nation as well as with the members of the healthcare teams in a timely and
efficient manner. These two aspects are important criteria for ensuring patient-safe
communication.