Importance of Effective Communication in Healthcare
Business communication is a necessary part of building an organisational relationship with all the present stakeholders of the organisation. In this context, the paper addresses the essential requirements to communicate in an effective within Health way organisation. It is essentially necessary that medical physicians and all other healthcare staffs communicate with all the service users properly within the organisation. Therefore, communication is the way, by which healthcare employees, physicians and service gather the vital information. It is the way by which health care employees learns about various information within the organisation and reason to visit the organisation. The physicians as well learn more about the consumers and help them in solving different issues. Therefore, communication can be implied as an on-going chain process in health care facilities. However, there are several ways by which Health way organisation can implement for building effective communication. This is because poor communication skills may give rise to a serious problem and conflict between healthcare employees and service users. Poor skills of interactions with service users may give rise to misunderstanding and faulty decision making that could adversely impact on the services users’ health as well as the organisation’s reputation.
Research evidence shows that there are several positive relationships found in between a health care employee’s skill of communication and a service user’s capability to follow with medical suggests on self-managing their condition. However, there are different types of communication structures that are present within the healthcare organisation. In this context, the major aspects of the communications system are:
Communication network: these are synchronous channels within the healthcare organisation through which information are conveyed through a wide variety of network including a general face to face communication till telephonic conversation, email and other technical methods of communication such as healthcare records (Taylor et al. 2016). These specific networks have attributes such as the capability to communicate that helps to determine the appropriateness of different tasks. In healthcare organisation, telephoning conversation is the most commonly used communication tool within Health way organisation. These types of communication are synchronous in nature that may have interruptions in it, and these interruptions may have a negative influence on the members’ who have high cognitive pressures. For instance, a busy healthcare provider may forget to conduct a medical task due to interruptions. In contrast to this, individuals as well can be separated from their efficient time; they may tend to use an asynchronous channel to assist their communication due to simultaneous discussions and conversations.
Messages transferred within the organisation are generally used to accomplish a specific task using the accessible resources to suit the requirements of the receiver. In these contexts, informal messages are these, that consist of the variable framework including voice and email messages, structured messages are that includes hospital record summaries, computer-generated notification and laboratory results. Therefore, when these messages are generated, they are typically formed in a format that complies with the health care standards that are arguably international factors of messaging.
Healthcare communication policies include formal procedure rather than technology, such as medical handover. However, a hospital can have a range of policies that help to shape their performance in communication supported by independent technologies. For instance, in health way organisation, there might a policy that restricts the general professionals to have the authority of medical records directly from the department without any prior permission of the hospital members (Raina and Roebuck, 2016).
Communication Structures within Healthcare Organizations
There are more communications policies that lay down the ways to communicate with the service users of the hospital settings that are needed to be completed by the employees. According to Australian policies commission for communication that objectives of the policies are to enhance and streamline the internal process of communication to encourage the vision and strategic priorities of the workplace. This process is involved in ensuring the dissemination of information to the staffs, along with the appropriateness of information amongst the employees. In this context, the policy is required to be implemented in such a way that helps to ensure compliance with the significant principles and standards’ of the best communication practice.
In these policies, there are several government advertising policies that the organisation needs to comply with such as government advertising Act 2013 (Mishra et al. 2014). This government advertising is the way to communicate advertisement related to health issues through social media and online campaigning. In this context, public information is disseminated to the general community members and service users about the program, policy or an initiate for the health and wellbeing. These type of program within the organisation Are usually
- Funded by the government institution on their behalf
- These messages are distributed under the authority of commercial advertisement agreement through the use of radio, television, internet and newspaper as well medial billboards.
Methods of communication |
Objective |
Employee bulletin |
Distribution of information from Health way executives to the employees that is important and relevant to the interest such as training, employment, vacancies and significant declaration within the workplace. |
Employee surveys |
Employee surveys are necessary for collecting information and feedback from the employees. |
Employee newsroom on the health way employee website |
These methods of communication will help the organisation to provide relevant information for the employees in easily available location. |
Organisational social networking channels such as Yammer by Facebook |
This method of communication can be used by the team of healthcare team members to collaborate and interact with each on the project through an online channel (Raina and Roebuck, 2016). Moreover, employees can use these methods to share and discuss ideas, activities thereby increasing the efficiency of work. |
Employee feedback through emails on the employee website |
These methods are made available for the employees to contribute the feedback and opinions for the improvement of activities and performance of the employee. |
Employee-related emails |
These employee related messages are disseminated to the employees through an email sent by the Heathway executive members employees are needed to be read and approve these emails. |
Messages sent through a distribution list |
These types of messages are used within the healthcare organisation to inform the group of team members to inform about special requirements as well as to promote upcoming programs and activities within the workplace. |
All the communication, documents need to comply with the legal requirements of confidentiality and privacy requirements in all the regards of the service users. These specific requirements are given within the NSW health privacy manual for health information. In this context, the major points for these are:
- Information associated to the health services are delivered by NSW health guidelines that help to recognise the requirements of the service user from the information for the purpose of maintaining health records and information Privacy Act 2002 (Raina and Roebuck, 2016). This specific information is generally subjective privacy and restriction on exposure. This information can only be revealed with the consent of the patient, guardian and authorised representative in accordance with the given Action.
- Health activities and specific health professionals owe a common obligation to the law of confidentiality for the patient with respect to the information gained from the course of offering health services.
- Ranges of Acts are set out under the particular confidentiality obligations that are inclusive of the Health Administration Act 1982, mental health Act 2007 and Public Act 2010. These requirements are governing under the NSW Health Privacy Manual for health and information.
In order to ensure the NSW health needs to comply with the legal necessities and information that are offered in the aspect of media enquiries and another communication method of activities conducted by the public health organisation. These legal requirements need to include the information about the service user requirements and consents before releasing them. On the contrary, the privacy and the dignity of the employees as well need to be safeguarded while dealing with media-related activities and campaigns (Jackson, 2014). In this context, Health Way workers must not access, use and expose any of the internal organisational information that obtained during the period of official duties unless they have authorities to do so.
The method of communication devices within an organisation can be running on different devices such as PDA, fax machine, telephone and mobile phone. Business communication within the healthcare workplace is related to communication way by which employees can communicate internally with the help of computing devices (Wang et al. 2016). On the contrary, interaction is designed within the health workplace in such a way al; the messages are delivered in an effective way to the service way without any interrupt and without altering the impact of the service.
Conclusion
Therefore, from the above study, it is found that communication system can be determined in terms of satisfactory interaction between patient and service providers and the different role of medial as well as devices that are employed within healthcare business organisation. The value of one specific communication medium is dependent on the other medium. However, there are several organisational challenges while communicating with the community members such as conflict or misunderstanding between the service users and staffs. Therefore, it is evident that in the case of primary care communication is the major way to deal with the wellbeing of the patients using various technical and non-technical resources. Simple interventions like structured form can help improve the standard of communication within healthcare workplace.
Reference list
Mishra, K., Boynton, L. and Mishra, A., (2014). Driving employee engagement: The expanded role of internal communications. International Journal of Business Communication, 51(2), pp.183-202.
Raina, R. and Roebuck, D.B., (2016). Exploring cultural influence on managerial communication in relation to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and the employees’ propensity to leave in the insurance sector of India. International Journal of Business Communication, 53(1), pp.97-130.
Taylor, A.W., Pilkington, R., Montgomerie, A. and Feist, H., (2016). The role of business size in assessing the uptake of health promoting workplace initiatives in Australia. BMC public health, 16(1), p.353.
Wang, W.Y., Pauleen, D.J. and Zhang, T., (2016). How social media applications affect B2B communication and improve business performance in SMEs. Industrial Marketing Management, 54, pp.4-14.