Poor Communication among Nurses and Between Nurse and Physician
Poor communication is one of the leading causes of mismanagement of patients in health care institutions today. Communication is essential if things are to be done accordingly. Good communication fosters good practices. In the medical field, good communication is the baseline of patient care (Foronda, MacWilliams, & McArthur, 2016).
All health care workers are supposed to work together employing good communication among them for good patient outcomes. However, it has been observed in many places that this is not usually the case. Poor communication practices have been upheld in many health care institutions resulting in medical errors leading to poor patient outcomes. Communication between nurses and nurses to physicians has been greatly affected in several ways. According to Foronda et al. (2016), this includes poor handwriting, little to almost no verbal communication, poor handing over practices and poor teamwork.
When it comes to nurse-nurse communication, the barriers arise in many areas. During handover, some nurses include very little information leaving out essential patient information. This leads to patient mismanagement due to the discontinuity of care. Nurses and physicians are supposed to work together as a team. However, most of the time nurses refer to doctors’ notes to find out what they need to do to the patient. This written information might be missing important elements hence leading to patient mismanagement (Tan, Zhou & Kelly, 2017). The handwriting may also be poor as observed in the works of many physicians.
In conclusion, communication determines a lot in healthcare. If poor communication is upheld, then adverse effects are inevitable (Johnson, Carta & Throndson, 2015). Nurses and physicians should work together and communicate if they are to achieve quality care.
References
Foronda, C., MacWilliams, B., & McArthur, E. (2016). Interprofessional communication in healthcare: An integrative review. Nurse education in practice, 19, 36-40.
Johnson, C., Carta, T., & Throndson, K. (2015). Communicate with Me: Information Exchanges between Nurses. Canadian Nurse, 111(2).
Tan, T. C., Zhou, H., & Kelly, M. (2017). Nurse–physician communication–An integrated review. Journal of clinical nursing, 26(23-24), 3974-3989.
