COMMUNICATION IN HEALTH & SOCIAL CARE SECTOR

Understanding the Concept of Communication in Health & Social Care Sector

Understanding the Concept of Communication in Health & Social Care Sector

1.1

Communication plays an important role in developing effective and long term beneficial relationship between patients and service providers. Health and social care providers has to possess good communication skills in order to develop good and constructive relationship with the individuals that are getting benefits from the provided services. It is also there responsibility communicate kindly and impressively with the families and supporters of the patients.

It is important for a health care provider or professionals to attain the relevant knowledge, practical skills, interpersonal skills and verbal non-verbal communication skills. In addition to such skills health care professional also needs to develop technical and strategically knowledge to cope up with the rising challenges of the industry. Details regarding each skill are as following (Cox, 1994).

Theory is defined as the set of different ideas that can be used to identify, understand, explain and make forecasting about something. Theories of communication is a tool that provides different ways of understanding and analysing communication among individuals, in addition, it also provides care practitioners an insight about what will work and why. Researchers have developed a number of theories from which most prominent and relevant are as follow. Being short staffed brings a large amount of stress to any area of healthcare; this is commonly when you will see mistakes happening like, medication errors, and treatments that don't get done. When these situations occur the communication of the team is more important than ever, and once a prioritized plan is created each member of the team needs to carefully follow it, and get help and support when needed.

1.2

Health and social care sector is characterised by the close interactions with the individuals. Therefore, it is essential for individuals to use different types of strategies in making health care industry more sophisticated and customer oriented. As discussed above it is essential for a health care professional to possess interpersonal skills, technical skills, emotional quotient skills, and pressure handling skills (Franco, 2002). Types of communication with patients that are deaf or hard of hearing are; writing things down and using cards. If being eye level with the patient and speaking slowly and clearly is not enough, trying writing things on paper. Make sure that you write big enough and clear enough for the patient to understand. If writing things down is not working, ask social services for cards with pictures on them. These cards have common every day pictures such as; toilet, bathtub, food, drink, bed and facial expressions so that the patient can indicate if they are happy, sad, mad or in pain. These cards are also great for people that are unable to speak. There is also sign language if your patient is familiar with that. You can hire interpreters for that as well and you can let the patient know that it is as not cost to ...