Communication is key to the effective functioning of all workplaces. When people’s lives and health are involved, it is even more important than in, say, a typical office environment.
Communications failures among hospital-based professionals can have the potential to impact patient safety, care and outcomes as well as overall performance. This makes studies in this area vital to the ongoing improvement of the health system.
A new research project funded by the PA Foundation aims to empower emergency clinicians and emergency medicine trained nurses to become communication leaders, so they and their patients will benefit.
The study entitled: Coaching for communication: Developing the team-member leader will see early career researcher Victoria Lister work with staff from the PA Hospital emergency department to help them feel confident in raising their voice and communicating their opinions and perspectives.
“It's about flipping our perception of team members and saying everyone's a leader. Not just the people who are the most experienced or the designated leader. Everyone, particularly in emergency medicine, needs to be an empowered team member-leader”, Victoria says.
“It’s about taking responsibility for the way that they communicate. They’re responsible for all their actions of course, but in this instance, it’s about how they communicate in the workplace. It's saying communication isn't just dependent on the leader of the team, everyone has to become competent at this very important skill”.
Victoria said a big part of her role in coaching clinicians to communicate more effectively is guiding them to answer their own questions about how they can be a better communicator.
“As a coach I act more as a facilitator, prompting coachees in a way that enables them to dig deep for their own answers to their own questions, she said.
“It's a very empowering method and it requires a lot of restraint on the part of the coach because often we want to jump in with advice. And it may be borne out of experience, it could be good advice. But that doesn't necessarily lead to the empowerment of the coachee.
“They're really drawing on their own strengths, identifying their own strengths. The type of coaching that I use is called Solutions Focused coaching, it is about helping them to identify their own solutions to their own challenges”.
Whenever the Foundation provides funding for a project, it’s driven by the mission to help patients, a fact not lost on Victoria who believes strongly in the power of communication to help people.
“Emergency medicine is, comparable to other types of medicine, very dependent on the capacity to communicate effectively and rapidly. The more emergency clinicians can hone their communication skills, the more that the patients are going to receive the care and support that they need,” she said.
“That's at the individual level. At the team level, there's been a lot of research on creating environments in which team members feel safe to speak up, and linking that with team learning. So in environments in which people are OK about speaking up and speaking up is welcomed, teams can actually discuss what happened, what they could have done, what went wrong, what went right, and learn.
“The learning then leads to enhanced performance as a team and all of this has an obvious benefit for the patient who's the recipient of those team actions.
“I would also add that there is a benefit in terms of the individual as an employee, because emergency medicine clinicians also need to be able to speak up about things that impact them as an employee. If they're not able to do that, that has an impact potentially on their well-being and that has a flow on effect to the well-being of patients. It’s all interrelated.”
