Provider patient communication

Provider-Patient Communication
Student:
Professor:
Course title:
Date:
Provider-Patient Communication
Effective and efficient communication between providers and patients is integral to achieving health care that is truly adequate. Patients with communication difficulties, for whatever reason, would actually keep on experiencing dissatisfaction, needless pain, consequential medical errors, premature deaths, as well as incentives to litigate due to various and usually avoidable, sentinel events (Travaline, Ruchinskas & D’Alonzo, 2005).
Effective nurse practitioner (NP)-patient communication is vital to the delivery of effective nursing care. The initial step toward effective communication in the delivery of nursing care is honesty. Nurses should not tell a patient that she will do something unless the nurse actually means it, and if the nurse cannot follow through she has to explain the reason why. If the nurse makes any promises, she has to keep them (Anderson, 2013). Other vital factors include responsiveness and availability as patients often become impatient or even angry whenever they feel that the nurse is ignoring them. Nurses are also keen on non-verbal communication and pay attention to body language, tone of voice, and eye contact whenever addressing patients (Anderson, 2013).
Patient-doctor communication is an integral function in building a therapeutic patient-doctor relationship. The communication and interpersonal skills of a doctor encompasses the capacity to collect information to enable correct diagnosis, provide therapeutic instructions, counsel appropriately, and create caring relationships with the patients (Ha & Longnecker, 2010). The objectives o...