Volume 39 Number 4 | August 2025
Summary
Effective communication in healthcare is essential for patient safety, outcomes, and workplace culture. Since most professionals lack formal training in professional communication, organizations must provide ongoing education using tools like TeamSTEPPS. Leadership plays a key role by modeling mindful, clear, and respectful communication, ensuring teamwork thrives and misunderstandings are minimized across all healthcare settings.
Stacy Walz, PhD, MS, MLS(ASCP), ASCLS Patient Safety Committee
This famous line from the movie Cool Hand Luke is quoted frequently and implies a fundamental disconnect between two individuals whereby a message is undelivered or misunderstood. Communication, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is “a verbal or written message” and “a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behaviors,” and is also used to establish “personal rapport.” The information exchanged in healthcare can positively or negatively impact patient outcomes, depending on its quality, completeness, and timeliness. All healthcare providers need to prioritize communication with patients and with one another, and ensure it is accurate, professional, and clear.
Although we start learning to communicate upon birth, there is significant variability in individuals’ personal experiences depending on their family dynamics, access to education, and neurological growth. In other words, very few people come into adulthood and their first “adult job” proficient and comfortable with professional communication. Within most healthcare professions’ educational curricula, there exists some content related to workplace communication, along with the opportunity to practice it in a clinical practicum, but it is rarely sufficient to ensure competency. Therefore, it is incumbent upon administration (laboratory, hospital/clinic) to include this training, especially if the institution has a preferred method. Additionally, training in the “behavioral arts” is rarely a “one-and-done” activity; refreshers, signage, and competency checks must be on-going throughout employment.
“All healthcare providers need to prioritize communication with patients and with one another, and ensure it is accurate, professional, and clear.”
Thankfully, there are many entities that have created acronyms and/or training to guide professional communication in healthcare. One robust, well-established entity is the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) TeamSTEPPS, which stands for Team Strategies & Tools to Enhance Performance & Patient Safety. Their materials are freely available and can be tailored according to the length of time available for training (two-day, one-day, half-day) and mode of delivery (face-to-face or virtual). The four modules are Team Leadership, Mutual Support, Situation Monitoring, and Communication. You may already be familiar with several communication methods included in TeamSTEPPS, such as SBAR (Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation), Teach-Back, Check-Back, and Closed Loop. These methods are simple, easy to remember, and foster high quality, complete communication of patient-related or workflow-related information.
In addition to the importance of accurate, complete, and timely communication with our patients and other healthcare colleagues in support of quality patient care, good communication within the laboratory among coworkers is paramount to a positive workplace environment. Much of the content presented in TeamSTEPPS is useful in creating strong teams and appropriate communication strategies, but it can be enhanced by development of laboratory leaders.
It’s no secret that management’s approach to communication, scheduling, evaluation, and oversight of laboratory activities can “make or break” the workplace culture. Whole separate articles can be written about leadership development strategies, but to “scratch the surface,” here are some points to consider.
- Management should be self-aware and mindful of how their own biases and assumptions impact their interactions with their direct reports.
- Celebrating and recognizing successes is just as important as addressing and correcting mistakes and misunderstandings; leadership needs to spend time and energy on both ends of the spectrum.
- There are a myriad of books, techniques, and advice out there to grow as a leader and a good communicator. I personally keep coming back to “the golden rule.” If one stops and thinks for a moment about how one would feel or react if one was on the receiving end of what is about to be said or done to a colleague, subordinate, or patient, it tends to create a more mindful, kind, and constructive approach that is received more positively.
In summary, high-quality communication among healthcare colleagues and with patients is essential to patient safety, positive healthcare outcomes, and a pleasant workplace culture. Few people come by professional communication naturally, so formal, on-going training and practice are critical to fostering this important skill set. And at its most fundamental level, “do/say unto others as you would have done/said unto you.”
Stacy Walz is Associate Dean, College of Nursing & Health Professions and Professor of Clinical Laboratory Sciences at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, Arkansas.