Communication
Good communication is obviously facilitated by the other interpersonal relationship themes and by an organizational structure with built in communication mechanisms. This section will focus on the importance of communication skills while the enabling communication mechanisms will be discussed later as a condition within organizations. Excellent communication skills is one of the key elements of team work. One participant summed it up this way:
Communication amongst all the players directly impacts patient care as illustrated by this quote:
When language barriers are added to the mix, the recipe for unintended consequences can become more potent. The Sioux Lookout Meno-Ya-Win Health Centre has employed interpreters and they have proven to be invaluable members of the care team in that setting. Even with access to an interpreter, there are unmet needs as it should be noted that in the Sioux Lookout area there are 19 First Nation dialects and three distinct languages. The importance of an interpreter was noted in the following story:
An observation from the various focus group interviews was that good communication skills and positive interpersonal relationships were evident within the interviews themselves. Because the focus groups were purposively recruited from settings where expertise and positive inclination towards interprofessional care (IPC) or interprofessional education (IPE) would likely flourish, this finding was not unexpected. It is something though that is not picked up from examination of the transcripts alone. One could easily see that the positive body language and tone, the good natured joking, and the respectful and attentive listening that were apparent during the interviews would also lend themselves well to collaborative patient centred practice. They enjoy working together.
When I think about the teams I've sat on that have been highly collaborative, it has been around knowledge of roles, it has been around process issues and understanding the expectations, having excellent communication skills, and having the time and space to collaborate.
…[patients] behave differently for a lot of different reasons and the more feedback that you can get about the possible reasons a person may be reacting or behaving in a certain way, the better. And to always include the person to who we are committing our goodness upon; the client, the patient, the consumer or whatever we are calling them these days, to make sure that they completely understand, or whoever their caregiver is to understand what is going on because there are a lot of unintended consequences of one discipline or somebody moving ahead in one direction and everyone is not quite sure or they don’t feel assured enough to say something.
They are a very important part of our team. Many patients are down here by themselves. They don't pay for family members to come. They don't speak our language and I don't speak theirs so there is a communication problem and without the interpreters we would miss a lot. They will also visit with the patient and from a Nursing standpoint I am able to treat my patients so much better because of the interpreter, because we can really discuss things with the patient through the interpreter and have a dialogue. Without them the dialogue isn't there….. I take patients to Thunder Bay for CT scans and Thunder Bay prides themselves as being forward thinking for Aboriginal care, but there are no interpreters and I'll never forget; I took a gentleman down there and he had cancer and he was going to go see the chemo specialist as his cancer had come back. There was no interpreter. It still haunts me are talking about this man's life and there was no way he could make an informed decision about what was going on and I knew the gentleman didn't understand.