Impact of the project
Clinical communication--the transfer of responsibility and accountability between clinicians such as doctors/nurses for continuity of patient care--is a pivotal, high-risk communicative event. Studies focusing on avoidable critical incidents have highlighted ineffective communication, including incomplete and unstructured clinical communication, as a major contributing factor (Pun et al, 2020).
Effective and accurate clinical communication among clinicians is therefore critical to the provision of safe and quality healthcare, one reason why the World Health Organization listed improved clinical communication in the top five patient safety solutions in 2014. By promoting evidence-based training in communication, this project will lead to safer and more efficient patient care.
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By extending the training based on the PI's research findings in Australia and Hong Kong to an online platform, this project would allow a much broader group of local and international stakeholders to benefit by improving their clinical communication skills.
Comments from Professionals
"I think the project and the videos are effective resources for students to learn more about clinical communication since various perspectives have been discussed. For the cross-disciplinary aspect, the video has explained how different departments communicate in order to reach mutual understandings."
- Dr. Jason Ho
"We hope the project will be an effective introduction to healthcare communication in palliative care setting for our healthcare students. The message is delivered in both forms of instructional videos and videotaped interviews by experienced clinicians and scholars. By talking about the information need and the skills involved in communicating with all parties including our patients, their carers and family members, we hope our students can get a bigger picture and gain a deeper understanding of roles of each party in decision-making. Through sharing real-life experience and stories, we hope to help our students to visualize the challenges ahead of them and put communication theories into practice. While the videos are prepared to reflect the local context in Hong Kong, they are presented in English – the international language. We hope to serve a worldwide audience, especially healthcare professionals, who are interested to understand more about the needs of patients from the far east. Overall, this project will form helpful resources to raise students’ awareness of the main features of effective communication in various clinical settings."
-Dr. Kaman Cheung
"I think this project is very meaningful and the videos are helpful for medical students because a lot of communication strategies have been discussed, for example, using analogies during the explanation with patients and caregivers. I believe that students would benefit much from these resources and they can further improve their communication with patients in their future clinical practice."
- Dr. Leslie Fok
"The project and the videos are useful for medical students to know more about the effective communication skills. I think that the videos do not only share the experience from different clinicians, but also demonstrate explicit ways that how students can communicate patients, which I believe medical students can learn a lot from the videos."
- Anonymous
"The project is practical and comprehensive for introducing the effective communication skills in clinical settings. The videos comprise the potential challenges that the medical students will encounter and how they should communicate with the patients. With the videos, the medical students can further prepare themselves into their future career. "
- Anonymous