The Importance of Professionalism and Communication in The Healthcare Field

Professionalism and communication between healthcare professionals as well as between a physician and his or her patient are the most fundamentally important qualities a physician can hold. These qualities are responsible for keeping patients safe and reducing the chance of medical errors. Perhaps the greatest and lasting consequence of not adhering to these qualities is jeopardizing the safety of my future patients. This essay will outline the importance of professionalism and communication and the impact these qualities have on the health of patients. Professionalism in the medical field has its roots in the Hippocratic Oath. Recognized as one of the oldest binding documents in history, it requires amongst other things, the physicians to treat the ill to the best of their ability and to preserve a patient’s privacy. While this expectation of professionalism from physicians has not changed in over 2000 years, the working environment for a physician has gone through many changes especially during the last few decades. While a physician still has one-on-one meetings with their patients, it is a team effort. 

In a hospital, the team of people taking care of a patient is extremely large and complx. The definition of professionalism in such an environment is not clear nor is it fixed. Wilkinson and two colleagues classified professionalism into five principles: adherence to ethical practice principles, effective interactions with patients and people important to patients, effective interactions with people working within the health system, reliability, and commitment to continuous improvement of competence. The care of a patient is a team effort with contributions from countless healthcare professionals. In the present medical field, a physician is also subject to numerous policies and regulations imposed upon them, limiting their discretion for the safety of their patients. A physician needs to do their best to be professional regarding factors under their control. “A commitment to improve, to my mind, if you had to give away everything else, that would be the one I would keep,” says Wilkinson. In other words, professionalism is a continuous process and every opportunity to enhance it should be taken advantage of. 

During the course of a 4-day hospital stay, a patient may interact with 50 different employees, including physicians, nurses, technicians, and others. While the areas of education and occupational training may vary, each one is important in that a mistake or misstep by any healthcare professional can seriously impact the quality of care. The importance of communication between healthcare professionals cannot be over emphasized. According to the Joint Commission (formerly the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, JCHAO), if medical errors appeared on the National Center for Health Statistic’s list of the top 10 causes of death in the United States, they would rank number 5 — ahead of accidents, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as AIDS, breast cancer, and gunshot wounds. To create good treatment outcomes, effective and efficient communication at every step of the way is important. Without effective communication, decisions will be made based on incomplete information, instructions can be easily misinterpreted and changes in status will be overlooked. This opens the door for medical errors and in some cases severe injury or patient death. 

As this communication is between professionals with varying time schedules and areas of knowledge about the patient’s condition and treatment, a strong communication system is a must to deliver clinical care smoothly and efficiently. For this system to work even adequately well, it requires a certain level of trust and responsibility between various professionals. Every error or mistake should be brought into light immediately and should be utilized to improve the system for the future. Because of cost constraints, the communication process must include latest tools and methods for peak efficiency. 

Webster’s Dictionary defines communication as “the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs.” Communication provides a basis for collaboration between healthcare professionals to deliver the best results to their patients. But a collaboration environment has other hurdles to overcome: additional time; perceived loss of autonomy; lack of confidence or trust in decisions of others; clashing perceptions; territorialism; and lack of awareness of one provider of the education, knowledge, and skills held by colleagues from other disciplines and professions. 

A physician’s ability to maintain an effective communication process with their patients has a direct impact on the quality of outcomes as well as patient satisfaction. Without good communication, a physician will not get all the information needed to deliver quality care and treatment decisions will be based on incomplete data. This cannot only lower the quality of care but can easily lead to overall patient dissatisfaction. This patient dissatisfaction can lead to decrease patient compliance and decrease trust between physicians and their patients. As patients and those supporting them are many a times inexperienced in explaining their condition, physician becomes responsible for eliciting all the information they need for proper diagnosis, treatment and follow up. As patients are generally not skilled in listing their concerns in the order of importance, the physician needs skill and patience to retrieve all the information they need to deliver quality care. This communication is a process and needs to be handled right at every step. Good communication directly impacts patient satisfaction by decreasing frustration, decreases anxiety and enhancing patient compliance with treatment plans. In acute situations, perceived lack of good communication by a patient can exacerbate their condition. A physician’s own stress level will also rise if this communication process is not working effectively because they will be working with insufficient data. 

Effective communication skill is a core skill every physician needs. It is estimated in a career spanning 40 years, physicians will conduct between 150,000 and 200,000 interviews with patients and their family members. Every little improvement in this skill will therefore deliver huge benefits. Lack of these skills will lead to decline in the quality of care, dissatisfied patients and medical errors that could put a patient’s life at risk. Because of time constraints, a physician also needs to be efficient in this communication process. Time limits need to be managed without leaving the patient with a feeling of being rushed. Physician needs to be able to direct the flow of conversation and help the patient express the needed information. 

Compassion comes from the Latin roots com, which means ‘together with’, and pati, ‘to bear or suffer’. It is defined as a “deep sympathy for the sorrow of others, with an urge to alleviate their pain. a deep sympathy for the sorrows of others, with an urge to alleviate their pain.” Generally speaking, this is a quality physicians strive to embody. 

The Transactional Model of Physician Compassion suggests that compassionate care stems from the interactions between physician factors (for example, calm, refreshed, fatigued, or burnt out), patient factors (for example, cheerful, angry, difficult), environmental and system factors (for example, noisy or quiet consultation room), and clinical factors (for example, case complexity, presence of unexpected complications). The emergence of compassion is not only determined by the doctor but is also profoundly influenced by context. To be compassionate, physician needs to look at various intersections between them and patient, clinical and institutional context. As they can directly control only a part of these intersections, a physician will need to make an extra effort each time to be compassionate realizing it’s not easy to be a patient. 

In so many cases, a patient’s life is in the physician’s hands. This has given physicians a special place of respect amongst all professions and as dictated by the over 2000 years old Hippocratic Oath, this places special responsibility on the physician to make their best effort to help every patient. The medical profession as a whole has gone through major changes over last century – new medical discoveries, methods and specializations along with use of latest technology in all facets of medical care, large corporate structures over medical profession, government regulations and patient complaints and legal cases. 

It is important for physicians to be well aware on the environment they work in so that they can make the best use of available resources. Physicians must insist an atmosphere of trust and responsibility from all healthcare professionals where every mistake is quickly brought to light and used to enhance the whole system. Physicians have a unique responsibility in overseeing a group of healthcare professionals while keeping the patient as the center focus. As a future physician, I must act in the most professional manner at all times, continually seek to enhance my own skills, and help others do the same.