Communication in Healthcare (Pre-Nursing)

This is a pre-nursing assignment on communication in healthcare, written for a student at a university in Ireland. It argues that communication is a clinical safety issue rather than a soft skill, separates verbal from non-verbal practice, sets the benefits of getting it right against a named framework, and closes on Ireland’s Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005. It was written at foundation level, before entry to a nursing programme.

For the service page, see nursing and social science assignment help. There are more nursing and healthcare assignment samples in the archive, including a critical analysis of national health policy and the role of registered nurses.

Why Is Communication Important in Healthcare?

Because clinical safety depends on it. The nurse is the link between the patient, the doctor and the rest of the team, so a detail lost in a handover becomes a detail lost in treatment. Communication is also how a nurse learns what a patient needs, how they feel about it, and whether their condition is changing.

What poor communication costs in hospitals

Adverse outcomes attributed to communication problems (Australia)

11%

Adverse outcomes attributed to inadequate practitioner skill (Australia)

6%

Adverse outcomes attributed to inadequate resources (Australia)

4%

Wasted each year by US hospitals through communication inefficiencies

$12.4bn

The evidence is not soft. The narrative review by Vermeir et al. (2015) reports Australian hospital data in which “communication problems were responsible for 11%, inadequate skill levels of practitioners for 6% and inadequate resources for 4% of the adverse outcomes”, and estimates that hospitals in the United States “waste over $12.4 billion per year because of communication inefficiencies”, over half of it through longer stays. The same review lists what poor communication produces on the ward: discontinuity of care, compromised patient safety, patient dissatisfaction and wasted resources. Those are the four consequences to name if a brief asks why communication matters.

Nursing is the front line of that problem. Nurses stabilise a patient’s condition and direct their care from admission to discharge, so communication between nurse and patient does clinical work rather than social work. Kourkouta and Papathanasiou (2014) call it “a vital element in Nursing” in every intervention, from prevention and treatment to rehabilitation. Beyond the conversation at the bedside, a nurse coordinates with colleagues and hands observations and reports to the doctor. That exchange is part of how treatment is decided: in the fieldwork reported by Gorman et al. (2003), orders emerged from interactions among patients, physicians, nurses and family members, and were negotiated within that group before they were carried out.

Communication in nursing can be defined as the exchange of information, feelings, thoughts, documents and data between a patient, a doctor and the rest of the staff. A patient relies on the nurse and will tell them about fears, concerns and symptoms they did not report at admission. Professional communication is how those are recorded and answered, so that the diagnosis and the steps needed for recovery are handled properly.

You may also like our nursing case study on traumatic brain injury recovery, which shows the same communication skills applied to one patient.

What Is the Difference Between Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication in Nursing?

Verbal communication is what is said and written: the handover, the explanation to the patient, the notes. Non-verbal communication is gesture, posture, movement, appearance and eye contact. Paraverbal communication is tone, intonation and pace. Skilled nurses read the second and third to test the first, because a patient who says they are comfortable may show otherwise.

Verbal, non-verbal and paraverbal communication in nursing

Point of comparison	Verbal	Non-verbal	Paraverbal
What it is	Verbal Spoken and written language	Non-verbal Gesture, facial expression, posture, movement, appearance	Paraverbal Tone, intonation and pace of the voice
On the ward	Verbal The handover, the explanation, the notes	Non-verbal Eye contact, and a posture that stays attentive while the patient talks	Paraverbal How a result is said, not only what is said
What it carries	Verbal The meaning: facts, instructions, the plan of care	Non-verbal Emotional effect and sympathy between nurse and patient	Paraverbal Emotional effect, carried in the voice

That three-way split is the one to use in an essay, because it is how the clinical literature divides it. Chichirez and Purcărea (2018) describe interpersonal communication in healthcare as combining “verbal forms (an oral and written language), nonverbal (gestures, mimics, posture, movement, appearance) and paraverbal forms”, and argue that the non-verbal and paraverbal forms carry the emotional weight of the exchange. Communication also runs in both directions rather than one, so a detail distorted as it passes along a chain of people can leave a patient with the wrong understanding of their own condition and the wrong attitude to their treatment.

Listening is the part students under-write. Chichirez and Purcărea put it plainly: “knowing to listen is the first rule of the dialogue”, and the listening they describe is active, empathic and physically attentive, to the point that a slack posture makes it harder to take in and remember what was said. Empathy in their account is not sympathy or a guess at the patient’s emotions but identification with them. In practice that means hearing a patient’s account in full, carrying all of it up to senior staff rather than the part that fits the chart, and following up what the doctor has prescribed.

The difficulty of the job is that no two patients communicate the same way, so a nurse has to work with the person in front of them rather than with a type (Kourkouta and Papathanasiou, 2014). Three habits follow. Use the plainest language the patient will follow and drop medical terminology they will not. Choose words that are constructive, because tone affects how the patient receives a result. Hold eye contact and stay steady when explaining a plan, and give the patient time to take it in. The nurse and patient relationship begins at first contact and lasts the whole cycle of care, so confidentiality and comfort are established early or not at all.

What Are the Benefits of Effective Communication in Nursing?

This assignment makes the case for six benefits: understanding a patient’s immediate physical and mental needs, reading their emotional state, picking up the social determinants of their health, tracking changes in their condition, identifying individual needs, and advocating for the patient with doctors and the wider team.

Those six are set against a named framework rather than listed freehand. In a monograph for the US National Cancer Institute, Epstein and Street (2007, p. 17) organise patient-centred communication around six core functions: fostering healing relationships, exchanging information, responding to emotions, managing uncertainty, making decisions, and enabling patient self-management. Naming a framework is worth marks, because it turns “good communication” into six things a marker can see a student doing. Each benefit below is followed by the function it serves, and the one function this assignment does not reach is named after the list.

• Understanding a patient’s immediate physical and mental needs. Communication is how a nurse establishes quickly what a patient needs and what state their health is in (exchanging information).
• Understanding the emotional state of the patient. Talking to a patient, and watching them while they answer, is how a nurse becomes aware of their emotional condition (responding to emotions).
• Picking up the social determinants of health. Housing, income, work and family circumstances rarely appear in the notes. They come out in conversation rather than in tests, and they come out only once the patient trusts the person asking (fostering healing relationships).
• Tracking changes in a patient’s health. A nurse who talks to a patient every shift notices the change a single set of observations would miss, and passing that on early is what makes a deterioration visible (exchanging information, repeated over time rather than once at admission).
• Identifying the individual needs of each patient and agreeing with them which can be met on this ward and which cannot (making decisions).
• Advocating for the patient with the medical team: acting on the patient’s behalf, reporting how they are recovering and supplying the observations that support it (enabling patient self-management).

Advocacy looks like communication with the team rather than with the patient, but Epstein and Street put it inside the sixth function: patients “often need advocacy, or actions taken on their behalf”, and that includes a clinician’s dealings with others inside and outside the health system, such as coordinating care with another specialist (2007, p. 29). The function this assignment does not evidence is managing uncertainty, which is about helping a patient and family live with what cannot yet be known about the illness, its treatment and recovery, prognosis above all. Saying which part of a framework your evidence does not reach is worth more than stretching a point to fill the grid, and a marker will read a forced mapping as one.

Health and Safety Legislation in Ireland: The 2005 Act

Ireland’s workplace health and safety duties come from the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005. Section 8 requires every employer to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the safety, health and welfare at work of their employees, which covers safe plant, equipment, training and supervision. Section 19 requires the employer to identify hazards, assess the risks and hold a written risk assessment, and section 20 requires a written safety statement based on it. Section 13 puts the matching duty on employees: comply with the statutory provisions and take reasonable care of their own safety, health and welfare and that of anyone else who may be affected. The Health and Safety Authority publishes the guidance (HSA).

The link back to communication is written into the Act. Section 20(3) requires the employer to bring the safety statement to employees’ attention “in a form, manner and, as appropriate, language that is reasonably likely to be understood”, at least once a year and when a new employee starts, and section 8 lists “information, instruction, training and supervision” among the employer’s duties. A hazard that has been identified but not communicated to the staff working beside it has not been controlled, and training, supervision and handover are the means by which the employer’s duty reaches the ward floor. That is why a pre-nursing brief pairs a communication essay with the Act rather than treating them as two topics.

The workplace safety angle also connects this assignment to organisational behaviour: our analysis of the work environment at KPMG takes the same employer-duty question into a corporate setting.

Need a similar nursing or healthcare assignment? Message us on WhatsApp with the brief, your module and the deadline.

Sources

• Chichirez, C. M. and Purcărea, V. L., 2018. Interpersonal communication in healthcare. Journal of Medicine and Life, 11(2), pp.119-122. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6101690/
• Epstein, R. M. and Street, R. L., 2007. Patient-Centered Communication in Cancer Care: Promoting Healing and Reducing Suffering. Bethesda: National Cancer Institute, NIH Publication No. 07-6225. https://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/pcc_monograph.pdf
• Gorman, P. N., Lavelle, M. B. and Ash, J., 2003. Order creation and communication in healthcare. Methods of Information in Medicine, 42(4), pp.376-384. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0038-1634233
• Health and Safety Authority. Workplace health and safety guidance. https://www.hsa.ie/eng/
• Kourkouta, L. and Papathanasiou, I. V., 2014. Communication in nursing practice. Materia Socio-Medica, 26(1), pp.65-67. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3990376/
• Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 (Act No. 10 of 2005), Ireland. https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2005/act/10/enacted/en/html. Sections 8, 13, 19 and 20 as revised: revisedacts.lawreform.ie.
• Vermeir, P., Vandijck, D., Degroote, S., Peleman, R., Verhaeghe, R., Mortier, E., Hallaert, G., Van Daele, S., Buylaert, W. and Vogelaers, D., 2015. Communication in healthcare: a narrative review of the literature and practical recommendations. International Journal of Clinical Practice, 69(11), pp.1257-1267.

Related samples: critical analysis of national health policy and registered nurses, nursing case study on traumatic brain injury recovery, and analysis of the work environment at KPMG.