Communication Is Care

Are you a healthcare provider who wants to go above and beyond to transform patients' lives? Do you want to be respected as a leader in your field? Can you imagine working with passion and purpose every day despite organizational demands? Do you have a desire to grow professionally? This is a practical and intuitive guide for current and future healthcare providers who want to communicate with dignity, empathy, and compassion. Discover how to develop strong communication skills and lead your patients to their highest level of recovery function and independence. In Communication is Care you will find out how to: 1. Define and align your purpose. 2. Practice with compassion and empathy. 3. Listen presently and completely. 4. Guide from a place of integrity. 5. Empower patients to be their own advocates. 6. Focus on solutions, not barriers. 7. Create a safe therapeutic environment. 8. Prevent unnecessary conflict. 9. Reflect and grow with impact.

This textbook provides the kind of comprehensive and in-depth preparation your students need to communicate optimally with patients, families, and fellow providers. Combining principles and practical applications, this text shows students how to apply communication techniques to patient care. It contains specific examples from many health care disciplines and is appropriate for all students in medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, and other allied health professions. Complete with chapter objectives, real-life examples and sample dialogue, and a glossary defining over 100 words and terms essential to the field of communication.

Communication and relationships have become an increasing focus of attention in debates about the future of health and social care. People working in care services are being encouraged to improve communication processes, to develop more participatory relationships with service users, and to work more closely in partnership with other professionals. This Reader provides a comprehensive collection of literature that aims to enable those involved in care services, as workers, carers or service users, to reflect on their everyday interactions and to situate them in wider contexts. Including new material from the frontline of research and practice, as well as some classic readings, this wide-ranging volume emphasises the need to see interpersonal communication as embedded in relationships, and to take account of issues of power and diversity, as well as the emotional dimension of care work. Covering both health and social care, the Reader is divided into four sections, focusing on: * concepts and contexts * analysing aspects of communication * the person in the process * communication and relationships in organisations. Communication, Relationships and Care will be an essential resource for students of social work, nursing, health and social policy, and for all involved in health and social care services, whether as professionals, carers or service users. It is a set book for the Open University's second level undergraduate course Communication and Relationships in Health and Social Care (K205).

This 2006 volume provides a comprehensive discussion of communication between doctors and patients in primary care consultations. It brings together a team of leading contributors from the fields of linguistics, sociology and medicine to describe each phase of the primary care consultation, identifying the distinctive tasks, goals and activities that make up each phase of primary care as social interaction. Using conversation analysis techniques, the authors analyze the sequential unfolding of a visit, and describe the dilemmas and conflicts faced by physicians and patients as they work through each of these activities. The result is a view of the medical encounter that takes the perspective of both physicians and patients in a way that is both rigorous and humane. Clear and comprehensive, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics, communication studies, sociology, and medicine.

This book aims to increase awareness about the importance of communication in health care. Written by healthcare professionals and Communication experts, it is replete with real-life scenarios that readers can identify with, and will serve as a guide to effective and efficient communication that affects the most important stakeholders in health care – The patient.

The authors of this book provide current research on the challenges of communication skills, its importance for health care professionals and strategies for improvement. Chapter One explores the literature that studies the impact of electronic medical record use on communication between physicians and patients. Chapter Two reviews communicating with the psychologically distressed patient. Chapter Three reviews major theories of neurocommunication intended as the application of the findings of neurosciences for the study of interprofessional communication and behavior in healthcare. Chapter Four studies decision-making models in patients with depression.

Supporting people with a variety of difficulties including hearing loss, impaired speech, visual impairment, dementia and learning disabilities requires a range of communication skills. This book will provide workers with the ability to enable adults with limited or no verbal communication skills to make decisions, and to express themselves.

Communication within the context of health and social care faces many challenges. Our understanding of how language and communication information is processed by the brain is increasing our awareness of the complexities involved and the influence of normal ageing on communication processing. Care systems are becoming more complex and service users demand more information and choice. At the same time, the range of service users encountered by practitioners includes more people with varied language backgrounds, and greater language and cultural diversity is occurring among health and social care staff. This volume explores current challenges to achieving effective communication in health and social care. It outlines how practitioners communicate, innovative methods for teaching communication skills, and methodologies to include children and people with communication difficulties in research and in consultation processes about healthcare. Particular communication issues, within the context of healthcare, for population groups such as older people, asylum seekers, young offenders and people with mental health problems are also addressed.