Good Communication Between Doctor And Patient example essay topic

According to Zhani, in the paper "Joint Commission Center for Transforming Health Care Tackles Miscommunication Among Caregivers" an "estimated 80 percent of serious medical errors involve miscommunication between caregivers when responsibility for patients is transferred or handed-off. Recognizing this as a critical patient safety issue, a group of 10 leading U.S. hospitals and health care systems teamed up with the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare to use new methods to find the causes of and put a stop to these dangerous and potentially deadly breakdowns in patient care". Zhani of the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare explains how a group of 10 hospitals worked on a study find out how miscommunication makes 80 percent of critical errors happen to patients. The miscommunication is during the transfer of a patient from one hospital person to another and the patient's information is mistaken. The study looked for new ways to perform the transfers to stop the danger to patients.

Zhani also explains, "A hand-off process involves "senders", the caregivers transmitting patient information and releasing the care of the patient to the next clinician, and "receivers", the caregivers who accept the patient information and care of the patient". When a patient has a nurse must transfer the patient's care to another nurse or to go to another department in the hospital one of the nurses "sends' the patient information and the other receives it and is called the "hand off process" of the patient. The U. S Department of Health and Human Services reports, "Handoffs and sign outs have been linked to adverse clinical events in settings ranging from the emergency department to the intensive care unit. The seemingly straightforward act of communicating an accurate medication list is a well-recognized source of error".

In hospital emergency rooms and even intensive care when patients are handed over to another medical person are causing malpractice legal action from patients because of miscommunication between the giving and receiving of a patient causing harm to the patient. Increasingly, diversity growth among America's population means hospital patients speak scores of different languages. In her research called "Linguistic Diversity: A Global Threat to Informed Consent", Dr. Betty Wilson reports "more than '18 percent of the people in America speak a language other than English". Providing quality, safe, and efficient healthcare in hospitals to diverse groups on non-English speaking patients requires the readiness of nursing and doctor staff. According to Susquehanna Health, services for the deaf and non-English-speaking patients work through a "television set and small video camera hooked up to high-speed phone lines-that allows the patient and doctor to communicate with an interpreter at a remote location". This means a special high speed phone line and translation machines give the necessary assistance to patents that are deaf and non-English speaking patients' get to talk to the doctor and the doctor to the special patient with a sign language expert for the deaf and a language interpreter for the non-English speaking patient.

Per Jean McDowell some of the typical errors for the wrong medication include "miscommunication of drugs" the patient needs and this causes errors. The Federal Drug Administration or FDA "defines a medication error as any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the health care professional, patient, or consumer". The FDA identifies any medicine given to a patient in wrong doses or even the wrong kind of medicine as an error that can be stopped from happening to harm patients. Miscommunications about patient medicine between nurses, doctors, pharmacies, product companies, and even the patient, are how the errors happen. If a drug order is incorrectly prepared it is often caused by not being able to read the doctor's handwriting, misunderstanding the correct drug name because it is spelled or sounds like another drug.

The use of zeroes in order numbers can be wrong and so can decimal points. Measure of how much of the medicine to give the hospital patient might be incorrect and even the wrong abbreviation for the amount the patient takes causes these errors. Coiera and Tombs in a study called, "Communication Behaviors in a Hospital Setting: An Observational Study" shows some hospitals "had clear policies about the way they managed their communication-for example, to decide whether a page would be answered. Such inferences about the intention of caller or receiver were unsound on a number of grounds". The research shows that the hospitals had ways to communicate that a patient needed a doctor right away but nurses who decided if the patient really needs a doctor are sometimes wrong and the patient suffers. Coiera and Tombs report, "Situations judged to be non-urgent by nurses have been shown to require medical assessment as much as ones deemed urgent".

The hospitals did not have important rules about calling doctors with all the important information about the patient condition and without that information the way to having patients suffer is possible. The study shows the hospitals need to fix this with stronger rules about complete information about a patient's condition so the patient gets the necessary care. Doctor Bettye G. Wilson says, "Cultural diversity is on the rise globally. One of those challenges is providing quality healthcare to those whose native dialect is different from that of the majority of healthcare providers called upon to treat them". Because many different people now live in the United States, hospitals giving good care to the different cultures and languages of patients' means having hospital people including nurses and doctors or at least, a translator who speaks the patient dialect and understands different cultures of patients so good health care comes from the communication ability of the hospital.

Doctor Wilson says, "A major aspect of patient care is communication between patients and their providers. Delivering quality healthcare and achieving positive outcomes can only be actualized through clear and unimpeded communication". Since the United States is providing the high level of medical care to patients this need for more hospital medical people to speak different languages so the patient can be understood. Doctor Wilson also says, "One of the most essential elements of communication in healthcare is providing patients with the information necessary to make decisions regarding their care, including the decision to provide informed consent for treatment".

Giving the patients the right information about the kinds of treatments or procedures they need depends on the translator being able to speak the correct dialect so the patient knows what to expect and decide if this is what they want to do. "Informed consent provides patients with all of the information concerning a procedure or treatment, especially if the procedure or treatment has the potential to cause adverse reactions or is potentially harmful or fatal", says Dr. Wilson. "Not only do these differences create a barrier to patient-provider communication, but they also place providers at increased liability for medical malpractice". Many legal problems come to hospitals if there is a miscommunication because no medial people in the hospital are able to understand the different languages or are able to talk to the patients in the language necessary to get the right information to help heal them.

Communicating between doctors, physicians, and nurses is also a cause of safety to patients. According to Jeanette Clough, "In every care setting - hospital, clinic, or office- patients become more prone to error and risk if the team taking care of them is not working as a collaborative unit". Without the medical team communicating at all time, patient become at risk of injury or worse. "The years have brought changes to both the medical and nursing professions that have the potential to compromise collaboration and teamwork if not acknowledged and understood", says Jeannette Clough. Because there are now transformations in doctor and nursing professions, there can be chances for miscommunication.

The study "Communication Problems Between Doctors and Nurses" by McKay, Matsu no, and Mulligan report, "Communication difficulties between hospital doctors and nurses are well documented. A survey undertaken jointly by medical and nursing administration at Sir Charles Gardner Hospital in Perth, Western Australia, verified difficulties in doctor-nurse communication as perceived by doctors and nurses, as well as by ward clerks as impartial observers". Records from an Australian hospital from a questionnaire conducted by the medical and nursing management verify that information exchange between the two cause problems in the hospital. When doctors and nurses have miscommunications bringing pain or worse to patients then there are legal malpractice court trials. According to Crane, in his "Six Top Malpractice Risks in Primary Care: Malpractice From Miscommunication" article, "Of course, good communication between doctor and patient is crucial.

A good bedside manner plus fully informing patients and their families when things go wrong can discourage lawsuits". Without the doctor and patient talking with one another and informing the family of medical problems when procedures or surgery go wrong resulting in injury or worse to patients, then the legal problems arise for the doctors and hospitals. "When patients sue, it's often due to a breakdown in trust with the physician. All of that can be averted with better communication", says Crane. For whatever reason doctors and hospital medical people fail to keep the patient and the patient's family informed about the patient's condition there is betrayal felt by the family and the patient.

If the doctor does not seem to care about the fears of the patient and family and do not get answers to what is happening the health problem of the patient and family anger and bad feelings arise toward the doctor and the hospital.