This lecture presents the work of Guttman et al. (Journal of Patient Safety, 2021) on communication barriers in healthcare.
In short: logging a failure as a "communication error", with no further analysis, prevents learning from it. We need to identify which barrier caused it and apply a specific tool.
Why it matters
According to the literature cited in the lecture, communication errors are a major factor in 70% of adverse events and are attributed to 37% of high-severity injury cases.
The five barriers
- Behavioural.
- Cognitive.
- Linguistic.
- Environmental.
- Technological.
What the authors propose
More generic training will do little for patient safety. It is more productive to analyse each error, identify the barrier that blocked communication and address it with evidence-based tools, which also makes training more effective and easier to measure.