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Communication 101: Creating the right environment to ensure effective communication

Nurse Leader Weekly, July 15, 2005

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Communication 101

Creating the right environment to ensure effective communication

Everyone knows patient safety is your hospital's top priority. But in today's hectic healthcare environment, adherence to best practices to ensure patient safety sometimes falls by the wayside-including effective communication.

To ensure patient safety, you need to support your staff's ongoing education and create an environment of communication and trust among staff, says Karen Tomajan, MS, RN, BC, CRRN, director of education and organizational development at OU Medical Center in Oklahoma City.

To create such an environment, you must first and foremost have in place non-punitive methods for handling errors, says Tomajan. "A blame-free culture involves seeing errors as opportunities to understand and improve systems and processes."

Communication is key to achieving a non-punitive environment. Listening to staffs' suggestions-and training leadership to do the same-is vital. "You want employees to feel confident enough to say, 'We need to fix this before it happens again,'" says Tomajan.

Talking tips and tools

Solid communication skills are also vital to ensuring that interactions between staff always positively impact patient care.

Barriers to good communication, such as passive aggression, power struggles between staff, and team issues can compromise patients' safety, says Tomajan.

To avoid errors due to miscommunication, Tomajan suggests using the following to train staff to communicate effectively-including during high-risk situations:

• Organize information prior to sharing it
• State conclusions
• Restate concerns
• Share support data
• Remain calm and non-defensive
• Be assertive
• Use the chain of command, if necessary

High-risk communication

• Capture the attention of the person to whom you're trying to speak
• State salient information
• State the action(s) needed

Use the following tools to help staff communicate:

1. Staff meetings.

Keep patient safety as a standing agenda item. Doing so will keep issues in the team's collective consciousness and make follow up easy to track. Keep the dialogue open and process-oriented to allow staff to feel confident in proactively discussing concerns.

2. Newsletters.

When preparing internal newsletters, include a column to address safety issues and improvements.

3. E-mail alerts.

E-mail alerts are messages about medication administration or potential complications sent to clinical staff.

4. Team training.

Team training is an educational approach for entire work groups to learn and practice communication, as well as practice process strategies to prevent errors.

Source: Adapted from Competency Management Advisor (July 2005), published by HCPro, Inc.

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