Health Communication: Health Care Critique

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  • Created by: Psych951
  • Created on: 07-01-19 17:26

Health Communication: Health Care Critique

Advantages

  • Important to focus on communication because how you listen can affect future communication
  • Can increase patient satisfaction, treatment success, understanding and outcomes
  • Providing whole-person care will improve health and thus reduce need to seek out health care, so in the long run be less time-consuming
  • Medical educators are stressing the importance of communication
  • NHS and GMC provide guidelines for acute care team communication
  • Strong link between communication and adherence, self-management and preventative health behaviour - Requires patients to understand information - Improves safety
  • E-health communication helps focus on health in the context of social life and increases mass personalisation, interactivity and convenience (Neuhauser & Kreps 2003)
  • Mass communication campaigns are improving e.g. for HIV they are more targeted, theory based and outcome focussed, with effects on behaviour change (Noar et al 2009)

Disadvantages

  • The situation may not always foster a patient-centred approach
  • Often requires a structured approach due to number of communication instances, and so requires dedication
  • Often many people in a chain of communication and so effective communication relies on consistency
  • Patient's will respond in different ways so some effective communication skills may not work for others
  • Measurement issues e.g. retrospective and reliability of self-report
  • Relies on an understanding of the importance of communication - Assessment within healthcare settings of the impact of communication is rare - Lack adequate training
  • Written communication is often overlooked - Has potential for positive effects but often has issues with noticeability, legibility, understanding and belief (Ley 1998)

Evaluation

There are benefits to focussing on communication in healthcare settings using a variety of methods, however it requires a dedicated effort to be effective

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