Kleinman: Effective Health Care Providers

Any time a person we love needs medical care we rely on professionals to answer our questions, give a proper diagnose, and recommend treatments. In the years behind us, doctors were unquestioned authorities and had the lead in conversations with patients over medical care. But with time things have slightly changed, and the relationship has shifted.

With the vast amount of information available online, patients and their caregivers are now able to educate themselves. That means they are able to search for specialists, research on their own for diseases, medications, and treatments, explore various alternatives, find out what others are doing in a similar situation, and more. Elly Kleinman is the founder and CEO of the Americare Companies. Working in the health care industry for over 35 years, he has witnessed the change of healthcare professionals moving towards partnership with the patients, in order to achieve optimal treatment and care.

The caregiver usually plays a central role in this partnership. As a caregiver you are likely to be the person who gathers information, speaks to doctors, transports the patient, ensures lab tests are done, prepares and gives medications, handles insurance, and takes care of many other related tasks. In this article, Elly Kleinman will offer some tips to remove barriers and encourage communication between the caregiver, the doctor, and other healthcare practitioners.

A little preparation goes a long way in making interactions with medical staff more effective. Here’s how Elly Kleinman suggests this can be done.

Recent researches indicate that ineffective communication among health care professionals is one of the leading causes of medical errors. When nurses were asked to point out contributing factors to patient care errors, most of them stated communication issues with physicians as a highly contributing factor.

The large amounts of literature, regarding safety and error prevention, shows that ineffective or insufficient communication among team members is a major contributing factor to such unwanted events. In a care setting, communication failures can lead to serious events such as increases in patient harm, length of stay, and resource use, as well as more intense caregiver dissatisfaction. Reflecting on the outcomes of communication, Kleinman has found that better nurse-physician communication has a more positive patient outcome, like lower mortality, higher satisfaction, and lower readmission rates.

However, due to a number of interrelated dynamics, effective communication among health care professionals can be quite challenging. Health care is complex, with professionals from a variety of disciplines involved in providing care at various times throughout the day, sometimes at different locations, creating a gap with limited opportunities for quality interaction.