Chapter 12: Communication
Katie Baker
Healthcare providers communicate with patients for a number of reasons. You may be discussing test results, lab findings or a new complaint with your patients. You may also be working with them to develop a plan of action for a multidisciplinary team of providers. In all of your Communications with patience, compassion and empathy our top priority. All Communications have the potential to build trust and rapport or to lead to distrust and separation in the provider patient dyad.
In this section, we will explore how to communicate with diverse patient populations. This may include using assistive devices to communicate with individuals who are deaf or hard-of-hearing or who are mute. And may also include communicating with patients who speak a different language through a medical interpreter. We’ll talk about how to access resources that your healthcare organization may already have in place to support patient communication.
It’s important to note that most patients will not have the background to understand medical terminology and so using an understandable and common level of language is important when explaining healthcare options and diagnoses to patients and their families. In some instances, a patient advocate may be helpful to support the patient and their family in navigating their healthcare including helping them to understand the information that their providers are sharing.
Finally, the emotional content of the conversation between a provider and a patient is very important to keep in mind. Unexpected bad news and the negative prognosis of a serious illness require a gentle delivery. Joyful outcomes such as a healthy birth or positive results of a treatment regimen likewise require a provider to express empathy with the patient and their family. Emotional intelligence, including the ability to connect interpersonally and control one’s own emotional expression, is a key skill for every healthcare provider
Communicating With Diverse Patient Populations
You may find yourself seeing a patient who requires particular communication efforts such as interpretation or communication using assistive devices. In these instances, it is the provider’s responsibility to ensure that all communication is clear and is understood by the patient. In this section, we will discuss the laws surrounding the responsibilities of healthcare organizations in this area as well as some examples of assistive devices that you may use. In the following section, we will discuss how to access communication assistance in the state of Washington.
Federal law requires that healthcare organizations provide medical interpreters at no cost to the patient. The laws relating to this include the Americans with Disabilities Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Washington State Health Care Authority, n.d.). In 2000, President Clinton signed Executive Order 13166, requiring all organizations that take federal funds to engage interp