Collaborative Communication and Therapeutic Interventions Collaborative Communication Essay

Collaborative Communication and Therapeutic Interventions

Collaborative Communication

Collaborative Communication and Therapeutic Interventions Improve care for Health Care Clients and Community

Collaborative communication and therapeutic interventions play a significant role in improving the care for the health care clients and the overall community. This is the reason that these days the health care organizations assess their performances and design high quality improvement initiatives for carrying out collaborative communication.

There is a very strong link between an effective communication and high quality health care. The satisfaction of the patient and his family members can be increased by doing two ways, clear, understandable and respectful communication (Morales et al. 2006, Beach et al. 2005). Gaps between the communication of healthcare professionals and the patients or among the healthcare professionals themselves bring disastrous and unexpected outcomes and the healthcare relationship badly suffers.

There are several ways through which collaborative communication and therapeutic interventions improve health outcomes. For instance;

1. The ineffective communications stops the patients from taking part into the decision which affect their well being.

2. When right information is conveyed to health personnel at right time, the decision taken by the personnel will be in the interest of the patient and his family.

3. Effective communication increases the trust of patients on health care units.

4. Exchanging information through effective communication helps results in shared decision making which is beneficial for healthcare professional as well as for the patient.

At my work place, there is therapeutic communication between the nurse and the client which results in constructing strong relationships which is client and goal directed. Nurses not only response to the verbal messages of the clients but also understand their feelings. They try to view the situation by the client's eye and feel what client feels before responding to it. However, staff sometime does gets frustrated when clients are not able to properly explain their problems and their family complains. Monthly training sessions at my work place which train staff for applying therapeutic interventions can help resolve these problems.

"Collaboration" as a an effective conflict management style but the most difficult to achieve

Model of Conflict styles was developed by Kilmann and Thomas (1995, 1997) which consisted of five conflict management styles; avoidance, competition, accommodation, compromise and "Collaboration."

In this style, both parties involved in the conflict agree on a mutual positive settlement to the conflict and attend the other party's issues and problems without sacrificing their own concerns. The conflict does not reach to an end until and unless both of the parties are satisfied and support the solution.

This type of conflict management style is considered most effective and ideal because it identifies the predictability of the human conflict. It faces the conflict and uses the conflict to find out the helpful and fruitful results. The results achieved in resolving conflicts with the help of 'collaboration' are positive as both sides win, communication between them is satisfying, their relationship becomes stronger and the solutions negotiated are cost effective in the long run.

This style is the most effective and preferred style of conflict management but unfortunately it is very difficult to achieve. This is because needs both assertiveness and cooperation. It not only requires energy and hard work of both parties but also their ability to share the control. Resolving differences with the help of collaboration needs lot of time as it involves; participants to find out the differences, identify areas on which they can mutually agree and choose solutions which satisfy them. This is the reason that this conflict management style is difficult to achieve but is most desired as it brings fruitful results for both parties.

Measuring Meeting Success and Using Information to set goals for Conducting Meetings

The success of the meetings can be measured by looking at the results of the meetings, which can only be computed if the objectives of the meetings were pre-decided. People spent hours in meetings without getting any fruitful results because they do not properly plan their meetings and agenda. If meeting management opportunities are neglected, the meetings will not bear the fruits which are desired from the efforts and time spent in the meeting. Utilizing the meeting time for bringing sustained results should be the priority of the health care units of they want to become successful organizations. In order to achieve this, healthcare units should manage their actions before, during and after the meetings.

Agenda of the meeting should be planned before calling a meeting and should be circulated to all the participants.This agenda can be a problem, confusion, any critical decision regarding patient, or any issue related to the health care unit, professionals, patients or their families. Looking at the agenda, a list of action items should also be created during the meeting along with the deadlines upon which they should be accomplished. The list should also mention who is responsible for performing the action. This 'to do' list should be provided to all the participants so that they can perform their pre-decided actions on time.

One of the most important things which meeting members ignore to do is the follow up. Managers must keep an eye on their team members and juniors regarding the task which was assigned to them. Date of the follow up meeting should also be planned in the meeting in order to find out, if the goals set in this meeting will be accomplished by the given time or not. Discussing problems and assigning task does not mean at all that the work is done. A follow up to check the progress is must for the participants in order to successfully achieve the tasks.

Identifying and implementing strategies for resolving communication challenges in today's health care settings?

Communication is also a challenge for health care professionals as it is for other working professionals. Health care professionals should have ability to understand the verbal as well as non-verbal communication of the patients as well as of their family members. This is because sometimes the patients and their families say something but in real feel something else. They might show that they are relaxed but in real they might be tensed. Therefore healthcare professionals need to deeply understand the feelings and frustration of patients and should also have ability to deal issues with patience.

A good example of communication challenge for me is an incident that recently happened at my health care setting. Mrs. Jerry who was diagnosed as a diabetic patient few months back was sent to me for discussing her dietary schedule. The problem is that she is a very outgoing lady, does lots of smoking and drinking and hates to change her lifestyle. She never listens to the advice and simple ignores it. She has also collapsed few times this month because of not taking her insulin dose and drinking alcohol in excess. Now my exam was to deal with her and convince her with the help of my communication skills and adopting effective communication strategies that she has to follow my advice.

I took few moments to figure out what strategy should I use to convince her. I realized she has fears that her life will totally change due to diabetes. I reached to a conclusion that I need to first agree on her thoughts that she doesn't want to change her lifestyle but at the same time make her understand that she can enjoy her life in same way only if she manages to change some part of it. I used this technique and it really worked on her, she understood my point and mutually agreed on handling the situation according to my advice.

Current communication approaches for dealing with internal emergencies or crises and external emergencies or disasters? How might they be improved?

All the professionals at my work place are trained to respond actively incase of any internal or external emergency or disasters.

Our health care unit has designed a well functioning command and control system.

We are trained to do accurate and timely communication at all times, which will also be helpful in case any emergency situation arises.

Our health care centre has well developed safety and security procedures which are very necessary in order to handle incident response operations during disaster.

Emergencies and disasters do not remove the daily requirements which are needed for medical and surgical services; staff of our healthcare unit has ability to continue both cases at a time.

One of the issues is that our health care unit has normal capacity for clinical care, it needs to expand this capacity to surge capacity in order to handle disaster situations.

How stresses affect communication dynamics? Strategies used to manage stress when communicating with patients and families?

There is a very close link between the stress and communication as the person who is stressed out cannot do effective communication. Stress faced by the health care professional is the result of the workload and due to the interaction with the patients and their families….....