How to Improve Communication With Hospital Patients

Many issues in modern hospital facilities make effective patient communication challenging. In recent years, hospital stays have shortened, and medical care has become more technologically complicated with fewer resources. In addition, patients and families need information and involvement in care in order to make informed decisions. According to a recent poll by the American Academy of Physician Assistants as reported on the Kansascity.com website, when patients were asked to give their top three most important parts of a health care visit, two of the three indicated the need for increased communication with physicians. This indicates a need for improvement. There are concrete steps that hospitals can take to improve their communication with patients.

Instructions

Improving Communication

• 1

  Take a team-based approach. Treatment teams that use non-physician providers can be highly useful for increasing communication with the patient. Non-physician providers can include social workers, physician assistants and nursing staff. These team members generally spend more time directly with the patients and give patients more opportunity to ask questions and receive more information about their treatment.

• 2

  Provide linguistic services. Diverse populations can present hospitals with challenges in the area of communication. For instance, people with limited English proficiency or who are deaf or hard of hearing often do not get the types of services needed for successful and thorough communication in a hospital setting. Such services may include foreign language interpreters, as well as professional sign language interpreters and/or access to an interpreter phone line.

• 3

  Learn about and follow guidelines put forth by the American Hospital Association (AHA). These guidelines are meant to help hospitals increase communication. These guidelines suggest assessing the issues of communication at your hospital, developing educational plans and strategies to address these issues, evaluating this process and sharing the results in order to assist other hospitals with their communication needs.