Ma. Harriette C. ApostolMedicine IISurgery/ Dr. AsanzaMarch 7, 2015

Communication: Simple yet Efficient

People usually seek medical attention because of their pain, discomforts, wounds, accidents and other diseases. The hospital environment creates a safe refuge for these people who are not only feeling pain but are frightened as well. However, inadvertent errors in the delivery of medical care has been recognized as leading cause of inpatient morbidity and mortality. As soon medical practitioners, we should maintain the hospital environment safe by reducing medical errors resulting to unfavourable circumstances to both the patient and the doctor. Although they say that men are just human beings and are capable of making mistakes, certain measures must still be done to at least lessen medical errors.One striking sentence that I have read in Chapter 12 is Poor communication contributes to approximately 60% of the sentinel events reported to the Joint Commission. Communication is a very simple tool that is inexpensive yet very efficient. Communication is an essential component of teamwork. A good teamwork in basketball games usually end well, right? If not, at least it was awesome. It is just quite similar to the OR team only that the goal is saving the patient. One good way of exercising communication in the OR is through pre-op briefing. A briefing, or checklist is any pre-procedure discussion of requirements, needs and special issues of the procedure. Usually, the operating room team are composed of the surgeons, anaesthesiologist and nurses. During the pre-op briefing, everyone must know each others names and their roles in the surgical procedure; identifying the correct patient and confirming what procedure the patient is up for; check if the antibiotics have already been given; give the team a heads up on the critical steps during the procedure and the potential problems that the team may face. Each instructions given must be relayed clearly and must be understood by all in the same context.Even after the surgery the team must still communicate because that is the time when they can review what went well and most especially what went wrong and address them in order for it not to happen again. In addition, in the study of Awad et al (2005), it is suggested that the operating room team undergo a dedicated training sessions composed of didactic instruction, interactive participation, role play, training films, and clinical vignettes. In their study, the overall result was a significant increases in the anaesthesiologist and surgeon composite score after medical team training.

Literature Cited:Awad, S., Fagan, S.P., Bellows, C., Albo, D., Rashad, B.G., de la Garza, M., Berger, D.H. Bridging the communication gap in the operating room with medical team training. 2005. The American Journal of Surgery. 190: 770-774.