Communication in Health Care

A growing body of evidence has demonstrated that ineffective communication at all levels of the healthcare system leads to poor patient outcomes, including serious illness and death, clinician dissatisfaction, and inefficiencies in the health system. Despite local and international recognition of the critical role communication plays in healthcare, and many excellent international policy initiatives to improve healthcare communication, there is little evidence that communication practices are becoming safer. In this course we introduce students to this relatively new field of healthcare communication research, accumulatively building up their qualitative and mixed methods research skills to undertake their own research project in this area. The lectures will detail both national and international evidence based research. The course will develop skills to firstly critically analyse features of effective and ineffective communication practices and then to translate these insights to the development of communication frameworks, models and training to improve clinical practice. Students will develop skills for analysing naturally-occurring healthcare interactions, and they will have the opportunity to develop their own research project using a method encountered in the course. Students will engage in discussion with their peers during class group work and provide peer feedback on select assessment tasks.