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The Growing Need for Effective Communication in Healthcare
Communications Strategies – There are several strategies that healthcare companies can adopt to ensure effective communication in healthcare. Improved communication within the team, patients, and other stakeholders will improve teamwork and patient satisfaction.
Poor communication can cause significant problems for healthcare professionals and patients. Communication failures are one of the emerging causes of death that could have been prevented. Lack of communication between care teams and healthcare providers is ultimately leading to potential health risks for patients.
This is why effective corporate communication in healthcare is essential. Improving communication will not only help improve patient satisfaction but will also reduce the overall cost of the operations.
Experts have identified that healthcare physicians lose over 45 minutes due to ineffective communication. This translates to £1 million in losses.
Strategies to Improve Corporate Communication in Healthcare
There are many ways that healthcare institutions can improve communication. Below, we have identified a few strategies that they can adopt to start benefitting from seamless communication.
1. Assess the Current Communication Methods
Before going ahead and making new changes, it is important to first examine current communication techniques. It would be better to determine your business’s shortcomings and find out which gaps to fill.
Make sure to cover what works and what doesn’t. After assessing the overview of the current communication, it is time to collect feedback. Hear what the employees have to say about it or if they have any suggestions to improve communication. Allow the staff to have a voice and make sure they feel included in this meeting.
2. Take Advantage of the Latest Technology Tools
With the development of innovative tools and software, a firm can implement modern and compact communication methods. Nowadays, there has been an uptick in the use of smartphones and other tech, which allows seamless communication. Healthcare companies can leverage this technology to improve outcomes.
Many hospitals nowadays are dependent on ineffective ways of communication, including pagers and fax. This ends up wasting a lot of time chasing down nurses and clinicians to inform them about a particular development. There are many platforms that provide faster text messaging across different departments. Hospitals can integrate these to enhance communication.
3. Streamline All Communication Channels
A healthcare firm needs to follow different protocols. Make sure to conduct an assessment as to whether your healthcare firm can implement a streamlined communication channel or not. The means of communication always have to be simple, but mismanagement and carelessness may lead to them becoming complicated or outdated over time.
The management can address the steps that are causing confusion in the overall communication. There is only one solution, and that is to choose a single platform where all workers can collaborate and communicate with each other. Nowadays, mobile phones are equipped with such platforms.
4. Leverage Mobile Phone Collaboration
Since email is not as popular among healthcare workers, pagers remain the number one choice for internal communication. Although pagers are a great way to alert someone and inform them, they are not suitable for two-way communication. Healthcare institutes can leverage different team communication applications to manage it swiftly.
In this age of technology, almost everyone uses a smartphone. By incorporating them in their communication strategy, healthcare institutions don’t have to worry about a slow rate of adoption among staff. They can instantly get used to contact each other using a single platform that’s compatible with their smartphone operating systems.
5. Give Employees a Voice
As we mentioned before, every healthcare firm should make sure to empower their employees and hear them out. Valuing their input can help a healthcare system foster an environment of quick and effective communication. Often, the employees know more about the organization than the owners themselves, and as a result, they can give valuable suggestions.
Every individual working in healthcare should have an equal chance to participate and voice their opinions and concerns. Whenever the hospital neglects their view and doesn’t value them, it can affect productivity, and consequently, communication levels decline.
6. Know the Value of In-person Communication
While using technology is vital, it should not divert the healthcare firm away from in-person communication completely. Face-to-face meetings are integral for effective communication between professionals. It could be possible that meetings may not be met with enthusiasm since workers are often overworked and have little free time.
Make sure to keep meetings short and make use of time in the best way possible. This will not only help in improving communication but will also eliminate any misconceptions among workers.
Adopt the STICC Protocol
The STICC protocol is one of the widely-adopted systems in different industries. The protocol ensures that the information has been understood by everyone after a briefing.
The STICC stands for:
Situation: This explains the overall problem and the context in detail
Task: It helps in delivering the course of action to tackle the problem
Intent: Why these actions are necessary
Concern: Laying out the consequences of the actions
Calibrate: Ask questions from the team and invite any questions or suggestions.
This is a useful method for addressing critical situations which are a common occurrence in healthcare firms.
Final Thoughts
Firm and effective corporate communication is a key to developing seamless communication. If you are looking out for an effective agency for healthtech PR, make sure they have the required skills to help you achieve your business goals.
