Gaps in Communication Amongst Healthcare Workers and Measures to Improve Patient Outcomes

Improving Communication Strategies as a Measure to Enhance Patient Care: A Quality Improvement Initiative
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Improving Communication Strategies as a Measure to Enhance Patient Care: A Quality Improvement Initiative
1 Background
Healthcare is a complex function involving multiple professionals with training that spans different specialties within the field. All healthcare professionals, from nurses, physicians, clinical officers, pharmacists, and everyone else, the purpose of contributing positively towards patient outcomes. However, gaps in healthcare provision often arise when different professionals offer their care services to patients at different times during the day and often across multiple locations. It is common for different care providers to hold different views on what the patient needs at any one time. As a result, such an individual would often advocate for prioritizing their way ahead of every other alternative. While the above scenario would present potent grounds for conflicts to arise, a central truth remains; that no healthcare professional can sustain healthcare provision alone. For this reason, working in perfect coordination and synchronization takes paramount importance.
As Amudha et al. (2018) explain, effective communication amongst health care professionals is of central importance because it enables smoother running of a complex system, providing care to multiple individuals. However, research by multiple scholars helps reveal that there is great inefficiency with how healthcare professionals communicate. Various works of literature also show that such inefficiencies have come at a great cost to overall patient care. For instance, Gray et al. (2019) show that ineffective communication amongst health care staff is a major cause of patient harm arising from medical errors. In another study, when asked to indicate contributing factors that led to errors in patient care, nurses identified communication issues with physicians as one of the two main reasons for such errors (Kim et al., 2022). Intimidation was another underlying issue identified by healthcare professionals, as seen in work by (Gray et al., 2019). Healthcare workers in this study revealed that they felt pressured to give a particular medication by a superior. These professionals shared that they felt intimidated and unable to communicate their concerns effectively, even when they had reservations about the effectiveness of these drugs.
2 Need for the Quality Improvement Initiative
As seen above, it is evident that effective communication at healthcare institutions remains essential for greater success with ensuring patient safety and preventing errors. As already established by Kim et al. (2022), various adverse effects arise with insufficient or ineffective communication amongst team members. The negative effects of such gaps in communication are felt even more severely with the provision of acute care. Poor communication between staff members leads to increased stays, greater resource use, intense patient dissatisfaction, higher turnover, and more untimely deaths in such a setting. In one such study, poor collabor...