Ineffective communication

• is a major cause of critical incidents in hospitals

• results in patient harm and death

• triggers most patient complaints.

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Ineffective communication can either be between nurses themselves in the process of transferring information about a patient. This problem has been the focus of research conducted by the principal investigator at both private and public hospitals in Hong Kong, in collaboration with the Hospital Authority of the Hong Kong SAR Government, the School of Nursing at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and the Institute of Communication in Health Care (ICH) at Australian National University (ANU).

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This underpinning research has been applied in work on nursing handovers which has trained more than 60 nurses to date. We have received further competitive funding from the Hong Kong Government to roll out more nursing training modules to all the nurses in Hong Kong public hospitals to improve their clinical communication skills and overall quality of nursing handovers. 

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Despite their demonstrated effectiveness, these face-to-face training interventions have not reached important groups, including: other medical professionals than nurses; students and other not-in-service nurses; and, critically, the medical professional worldwide, for whom the communication challenges are equally relevant.  

 

The present project aims to broaden the impact of the existing research findings by developing an online self-access training platform entitled: “Communicating for patient safety through effective clinical communication.” The outcome of the project will be a series of videos involving scholars and experienced clinicians. It will provide an evidence-based online training platform to improve the quality of clinical communication.