Enhancing Healthcare through Effective

Communication skills are referred to the abilities that are used for providing and receiving various nature of information. The communication skills in healthcare are important to improve care quality, trust between patient and service providers, improving collaborative working and others. In this report, the significance of verbal as well as non-verbal communication is to be discussed with importance of listening skills. Moreover, the importance of digital or written communication skills for the nurses while caring for the service users along with the carers and colleges are to be explained.

Importance of effective communication skills

Good communication skills can help to build an effective therapeutic relationship between nurses and service users. In order to communicate effectively, in the presentation we used verbal, non-verbal, and effective listening skills. Verbal communication was strengthened because the students from other groups was actively listening to our presentation (Perry, 2007). To support verbal interactions, we used non-verbal communication skills and to provide appropriate answers to the audience regarding our subject, we actively listened their questions to enable successful communication (RCN).

Verbal communication

The importance of effective verbal communication in healthcare is that helps the nurses to resolve issues in care faced by the service users as well as assists them in meeting the needs and demands of the service users (Perry, 2007). The nurses to verbally communicate in effective manner are to ensure they use appropriate language with clear and accurate words (Benbow and Jordan, 2009). In the group presentation, to ensure importance of effective verbal communication is implemented it was seen that clarified and honest information are communicated with soft voice and loud enough for the information to be audible for the audience. As argued by Elliott et al. (2016), effective communication cannot be established if the information communication is mentioned verbally in such a way that it could not be understood by the listener. This is because the purpose of the message to be delivered is not fulfilled in the case as the receiver cannot determine the information communicated.

The effective verbal communication is important as it helps to save time in sharing information through other mode as well as ensures reliability (Howick et al. 2018). This is because the nurses by sharing information through verbal communication are able to immediately deliver the message as well as avoids manipulation of information by personally taking responsibility to inform the message. Open questions enable nurses to collect more information about their patients to provide appropriate treatment and close question also required on clinical observation such as ‘have you drink anything?’ (Iggulden at el, 2009).We kept few open and close questions, afterword we answered for them on our slides, to invite the audience to elaborate and direct their attention to a few specific aspects of the presentation.

The importance of verbal communication is that it helps to properly persuade service users as well as assists nurses to control information sharing with the colleagues for managing proper team work in healthcare (Berman and Chutka, 2016). This is because verbal communication leads nurses to showcase their personally and use different words to persuade the service users in accepting care from them. Moreover, verbal communication allow nurses to make one-to-one conversation between colleagues helping them to personally share information regarding work to form collaboration in executing team activity.

The importance of verbal communication in healthcare is that it allows the nurses to flexibly communicate data and information to the service users. This is because while communicating verbally the nurses are able to use varied languages based on the culture, environment, religion and other aspects considered by the service users to participate in successful interaction (Stanyon et al. 2016). We could communicate more successfully if there was not any timing barrier, because of timing we had to skip few details about our subject which could help the audience to understand better. Also, the room was too small and background noises came from other rooms which sometime affected our communications (Perry, 2007).

Non-verbal communication

Non-Verbal communication exists at the same time with verbal communication and where, non- verbal cues add meaning to verbal communication (Perry, 2007).Provide care and support to the patients and maintain professional boundaries nurses must use appropriate non-verbal communication skills. To enhance compassionate care towards patients, nurses should notice, and response patients’pain (NMC, 2018). The importance of non-verbal communication in healthcare is that through it the nurses are able to communicate their emotions and empathy with others while communicating verbally at the time (Härgestam et al. 2016). This is evident as face is an important part of body to reveals emotions and proper facial expression are used by the nurses during non-verbal communication to reveal their emotions and empathy towards the service users. It is seen that Patients often can feel nurse’s intention by facial expression while they interact with the patient (Burnard and Gill, 2009). Therefore, everyone in our group was gently smiling while presenting, which indicated that we were happy and enjoying togiving information. Also, the audiences were nodding their head which indicated their acceptance and acknowledgment about the presentation (Benbow and Jordan, 2009). The importance of effective non-verbal communication in healthcare is that it can allow the nurses to covey the service users and others that they understand the information communicated by them (Asan et al. 2015). This is because nurses use good eye contact to the patients while communicating because it provides respect and a willingness to listen to them as well as show they are being tried to be understood. However, eye contact indicates interest, involvement, and attention therefore, throughout our presentation, we maintained good eye contact to audiences to achieve effectiveness of communication(Dewit et al., 2005).

Effective listening

Effective listening communication skills are essential key element for good communication in nursing practice because nurses work closely with patients and they often tell important things to nurses. Detect patient’s improvement, deterioration, effectiveness of drugs, and monitoring condition can be easier if the nurses really listen and attending to what patients say. To provide safe, compassionate, empathetic, person-centred, evidence-based nursing, nurses should see the world by patients view which can only possible by effective listening of patient’s thought and feeling of their suffer. Nurses cangive regular feedback to the patient while listening them such as a nod, facial expression, and occasional "umm", "yeah" or "uh" without interrupting, which could prove that the nurse is listening effectively(Nolan et al., 2006). Sometime open question might increase the effectiveness of conversation. Also, nurses should reflect to the patient that what you have understood as a listener which can promote dignity that you listened them effectively. When we developed our presentation, we planned to deliver our presentation by maintaining an open position, lean slightly towards audience, maintain reasonable eye contact, and sensible use of minimal prompts because those can aid to effective listening.

Accordingly, Goodman and Ley (2012) - stress, anxiety, staff shortage, and lack of attention to listening behavior affect successful listening in nursing care settings. Sometimes in care settings, it is impossible to listen the patients effectivelybecause of lack of privacy, lack of enough time, and while undertaking routine tasks. On our presentation, we faced some barrier to demonstrate effective communication skills while presenting which ismost of theaudiences were stressed for their own presentation, therefore theywere unable to relaxed and listen effectively (Grandis et al., 2003)

Importance of digital/written communication skills

Now a day, digital communication represents one of greatest opportunity to make nursing service more efficient and help manage patient need in an equitable way (Dewit et al., 2005). Also, digital tools are now an integral part of our personal and professional daily routine. The importance of digital or written communication is that it helps to preserve health data of the patients in easier and permanent manner (RCNI, 2016). Therefore, it is crucial for nurses to have up to dated digital or written communication skills. To work within professional framework nurses, must make sure written records are not left in public places where unauthorized people might see them, and that any electronic system is protected before you sign out (RCNI, 2016). This is because it may lead to violation of maintaining privacy of the patients in turn making them vulnerable to harm or abuse in the society due to publication of the personal data.

The written information is important in healthcare as it helps keeping permanent record of data and accurate presentation of information without error (RCNI, 2016). This is evident from our presentation where written information on the slides helped the audiences to achieve more information which they may mishear or did not hear verbally. The digital communication in healthcare is important as it helps the nurses to convey the information through audio visual mode (NMC, 2018). This is evident from the presentation where the digital communication skills, such as videos, online survey, diagrams, pictures and symbols helped the audiences to visualize the subject more effectively.

Staff shortage also one of the biggest barrier in written communication, for example a nurse just completed her routine observation and in the same time she has been asked by the patient to help him to take him to the lavatory, now to enhance empathetic and compassionate care she has to document the observation later which can increase the chance of error on written documents. Also, sometime digital communication can be face conflict situation because of poor internet connection. On our presentation timing was the biggest barrier, we couldn’t explain more details in writing because of time limitation.

Communication is an important tool in the healthcare profession where a patient can feel vulnerable, homesick, and anxious and only good communication can help patients to receive safe, compassionate, person-centred and evidence based effective care (NMC, 2018). A person can be express his/her needs with the verbal communication where non-verbal communication could be used to show emotions. Sometimes non-verbal communication act stronger than verbal communication, it depends on the situation. Also written communication/digital communication are an important element in evidence-based nursing care but without these skills’ communication is incomplete and less meaningful.

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References

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