FAILURE
to
When it comes to hospital
patient care, communication
between doctor and nurse should
be seamless. If it’s not, patients
suffer. Here’s how to find out
if a miscommunication is at the
core of your client’s case.
On a single day in the average 500-bed acute-care hospital,
patients undergo an estimated 300 imaging studies and 2,500
laboratory tests, and they’re the subject of several thousand
conversations between health care providers regarding
their care.1 While accurate information exchange between
providers is essential to delivering safe care, too often the lines
of communication break down—with disastrous results.
Ineffective communication is one of the most frequently cited
causes of serious medical injuries.2 One study identified communication failure as the direct cause of 70 percent of the injuries
sustained by more than 2,000 hospital patients.3 Seventy-five
percent of those failures led to a patient’s death.4
The more complex a patient’s care, the more likely it is
that an error in communication will occur. The treatment of
