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In acute care settings across the country, the traditional means of communicating with nurses — e-mail, flyers, Web sites, and meetings are not always ideal methods for assuring nurses get the information they need to care for patients. Yet, the need for communication is greater in today’s healthcare marketplace than it has been in the past.

Communication has been acknowledged as a fundamental component of nursing in the delivery of patient-centered nursing care*.

Of all the daily nursing requirements — caring for patients, contending with high patient turnover, doing more work with less personnel and responding to their ever-increasing role in patient safety and accountability — formal communication processes are often the last thing nurses think about when it comes to getting needed information.

When nurses have an opportunity to retrieve information, they often wade through a barrage of e-mails and the many forms of written communication they receive on a daily basis. Those often include facility operations, new nursing initiatives, practice alerts as well as educational information on new equipment, technology, and standards. Information sent to nurses has become so abundant they no longer have adequate time to decipher which messages have greater value or importance. Nurses, like other healthcare professionals, are suffering from message overload and fatigue.

Communication Strategies

To assure nurses get the needed information, nursing leadership, communication specialists, and nurses should join hands to identify a communication strategy that facilitates the delivery and retrieval of pertinent information.

Ideas to Facilitate Communication

• Limit the number of key messages you disseminate per year (four to six messages is ideal)

• Prioritize messages and communicate them via several communication modalities

• Keep your messages clear, concise and to the point

• Maximize information dissemination by bundling key messages based on specialty of service which allows for one-stop information retrieval

• Incorporate new and existing communication modalities to deliver messages (Just-In-Time video messages, Podcasts, Webinars, Web site, blogs, newsletters, etc.)

• Utilize existing hospital infrastructure — monthly committee meetings, — to disseminate messages

• Create peer-to-peer, nurse-to-nurse communication teams to relay information

• Solicit feedback on the communication methods used and make modifications as needed

• Be flexible and accommodating to new communication ideas

• Meet with nurses to understand their needs and the environments in which they work

Understanding Your Audience

Adopting innovative methods to successfully deliver information to the bedside nurse requires a multidisciplinary team involving the chief nursing officer, information officer, directors, managers, and nurses from various clinical units to identify the best ways to get needed information to support performance excellence in safety, quality and service.

As the demands to deliver quality patient care increase, so does the need to communicate effectively with nurses. Nurses need information that is relevant, pertinent, and meaningful. Information should be readily accessible and retrievable whenever and wherever nurses need it.

Finding innovative and creative ways to communicate need not be costly or difficult. It generally requires listening to your target audience, expanding on the collaborative nature of nurses, and good old-fashioned common sense.

*References: Wilkinson S., Roberts A. & Aldridge J. (1998) “Nurse-patient communication in palliative care: an evaluation of a communication skills program.” Palliative Medicine; Booth K., Maguire P. & Hiller V.F. (1999) “Measurement of communication skills in cancer care: myth or reality?” Journal of Advanced Nursing.

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Christina M. Guillen-Cook, RN, MBA, is nursing manager of communication at Providence Health & Services in Medford, Ore. To comment, e-mail editorMTW@nurseweek.com.