NHS patient safety and problems with communication

Communicating properly in any field of professional endeavour is an essential prerequisite for its success. You will fail if you do not communicate properly with those with whom you engage at all levels of the enterprise, be they clients, customers or patients. Good communication strategies encourage trust and should display empathy and understanding.

From a legal and patient safety perspective, past litigation cases often have a direct correlation with communication. If the nurses, doctors and others had communicated properly with the patient in the first place, there would have been no legal claim or complaint. It is often said by patient safety legal stakeholders that what patients most often want is not to sue or complain. What they require is an explanation of what occurred, an apology and an assurance that what happened to them will not happen to anybody else. That lessons have been learnt.

We also have the issue that trusts and others can be more concerned with protecting their organisational reputation than communicating openly with patients when adverse health events occur. There is, as I have said in my previous BJN columns, a prevailing view that the NHS demonstrates too much of a defensive culture when it comes to responding to patient safety incidents. A focus on protecting the reputation of the organisation inhibits proper patient communication strategies. Developing communication strategies may also be seen by some health professionals as being a soft skill and one which they automatically have – a skill that does not need to be worked on as much as other skills.