Miscommunication between health workers puts patients at risk regularly, a new study says

Poor communications between health care workers contributed to 25% of hospital incidents that put patients’ safety at risk, researchers report in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

What’s more, miscommunication was the sole cause of patient endangerment in one out of 10 cases, researchers found.

These cases included medication errors and medical errors that resulted in health-threatening events or near-misses, researchers said.

“Poor communication is a substantial cause of patient safety incidents,” concluded the research team led by Jeremy Howick, a professor at the University of Leicester Medical School in the U.K.

“Our findings highlight the crucial need for health care professionals to develop and maintain effective communication skills to foster strong relationships with their peers and their patients,” the team added.

On average, about one in every 20 patients is exposed to preventable harm in health care, researchers said in background notes.

For their paper, researchers pooled results from 46 prior studies involving nearly 68,000 patients from Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa and Australia. The studies were published between 2013 and 2024.

Results showed that poor verbal, written, electronic and non-verbal communication was a factor in a quarter of cases where patient safety was threatened.

In one instance, a doctor accidentally shut off a heart medication drip while trying to silence a beeping pump, researchers said. The doctor failed to tell a nurse the drip was stopped, and the patient subsequently developed a dangerously high heartbeat.

In another case, a patient died after a nurse failed to tell a surgeon that the person was experiencing abdominal pains following surgery and had a low red blood cell count, which indicated internal bleeding.

The undetected hemorrhage that killed the patient could have been prevented, researchers said.

More research is needed to figure out why such poor communication exists, and how it can be improved to protect patients, researchers said.

“Health care professionals seeking to enhance their own communication skills may be guided by published reports of communication interventions designed to improve patient safety,” researchers wrote. “These interventions offer standardized approaches to verbal communication between health care professionals, and between health care professionals and patients.”

However, more research is needed “to optimize and develop such interventions further, and to identify which interventions are most effective at improving patient safety,” researchers added.

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