What Current Issues Affect Communication In Health Care Organizations?

As with many industries, the health care system has seen major cuts in recent years. This has lead to staff working longer hours and doing more jobs. This results in a very busy work environment and ends up with communication being very hard to achieve.

The main reasons communication is affected in health care organizations are as follows:

• Staff miss meetings or messages due to having to work longer hours and cover shifts
• The management cannot be on the floor or are not approachable as they are too busy
• Memos or emails are used instead of proper face to face meetings due to time constraints
• Nurses and other staff members are bound by patient confidentiality laws

Communication is crucial in any type of business or organization but this has been severely hampered in the health care sector due to lack of time. This has meant that staff meetings are not attended as often due to prior shift commitments or they are simply not run.

Meetings are crucial for addressing any problems and giving firm directions on how to move forward. Therefore a lack of meetings means a communication is lost between staff and their management which can affect team morale and productivity.

Also if the management are too busy with paperwork upstairs then the doctors and nurses will find it hard to talk to them during a working day. Again this leads to a lack of communication between parties.

Due to emails and memos being a very instant way of sending a lot of people the same message, this is often used instead of face to face interaction. This can affect communication as the issues are not discussed the same way they would be in a proper conversation.