The Impact of Communication in Healthcare Sector

The Impact of Communication in Healthcare Sector

There is no doubt that communication is critical in the healthcare sector. Physicians have to convey their diagnostic results to the patients; they also need to inform the patients on the best way to take care of their health conditions. At the same time, patients need to be in touch with their care providers whenever they detect any anomaly. Different scholars have proposed different views on the issue of the significance of communication in the health care sector.

It had been presumed that the communication approach in the healthcare facility is general for all patients. However, Hyatt (2015) suggests that delicate patients, like the LGBT community, need a special type of communication. In the article “Improving LGBT Healthcare communication,” the author sought to find out how specialized and effective communication would help in improving medical uptake by the LGBT group and other patients with special health or social complications. The author conducted stratified research on the LGBT community through an interview survey on sexual orientation and how they perceived the approach by physicians in terms of communication and general address while attending to them.

From the research, it was concluded that most of the medical practitioners in the healthcare facilities lacked specialized skills that would enable them to understand the distinction between LGBT health problems from non-LGBT patients. It was further established that the lack of specialized training in communication with special groups made several individuals with such health complications to shy away from seeking medication

According to Lapao, Stantos, and Gois (2007), effective communication is a very vital tool for creating healthcare awareness to the public. The authors conducted research to find out how marketing strategy would enhance access to healthcare information to the members of the public in two different hospitals in Portugal. The researchers conducted a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of healthcare promotion at Instituto Nacional de Administração and Centro Hospitalar do Baixo Alentejo. From their study, the authors established that the use of ICT and e-health programs give patients an opportunity to properly and easily manage their health programs. Further, the study established that health awareness levels have so far gone up.

Again, Malette et al. (2014) conducted a research to establish the effectiveness of using social media to enhance communication between care providers and the patients as well as other partners in different departments. The authors commenced by conducting a literature review of the utilization of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms in advancing healthcare. From their review, the authors discovered that institutions that had well organized LinkedIn platform were well ahead of their colleagues that relied on formal communication in the dissemination of information. Furthermore, the findings also revealed that the use of social media platforms also enabled such facilities to have a network of information flow that also contributed immensely to capacity building and improvement in competencies of the various staff and employees who worked in these facilities. The authors thus opined that despite the differences in applicability of Facebook and LinkedIn, they would merge the two systems to come up with a more refined tech that would aid in the sharing of information between care providers and their patients and consequently enhance the quality of service delivery.

In conclusion, it is imperative to underscore that either way, communication plays a very fundamental role in enhancing the quality of care. There is a need to have adequate knowledge of communication to enable care providers to attend to patients with special cases, again marketing contributes to creating health awareness, and the utilization of social media can improve the quality of care greatly.

References

Hyatt, J. (2015). Improving LGBT healthcare communication. Journal of Medical Ethics, Vol. 1 (1), 1-16

Lapão, L. V., Santos, R. S., & Góis, M (2007).   Healthcare internet marketing: developing a communication strategy for a broad healthcare network, INA Internal Report 1-17

Malette, N.  J et al. (2014) Using Social Media to Advance Healthcare Communication. Proceedings of the 2014 Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference, 1-10