Personal and Professional Health Care Communication - Essay Example

Health care groups are deemed to be amongst the most effective preventive building block in any society. In health care institutions one of the most common things that we come across are community based projects that deal with many issues including substance abuse, reproduction health etc. In order to extract the maximum amount of benefit from these settings, effective health care communication need to be encouraged amongst the doctors, patients who are being treated, as well as various pharmaceutical companies which are producing drugs.

Health communication is also very much relevant as it is through proper communication that people get to know of various health issues. It is a result of communication between health care professionals and the patients that both get to hands on to new information (Northouse & Northouse, 1998). The patient gets to know from the doctor about various medical conditions and how to deal with them. Whereas during such a process the doctors themselves often come across new medical cases and they can then use such cases to enhance their own knowledge and carry out further research.

There is a deep link between proper and timely health care communication and health care outcomes / results. When there is no proper communication between the health care professionals and patients, no proper treatment can be carried out at all. To take a very simple case if the patient is himself unable to explain to the doctor correctly what problems he's facing, then the doctor would so not be able to prescribe him the correct medicine or be able to carry out the correct treatment and, therefore, the patient would have no visible health benefits.

Patients need to be taught to open up the doctor completely and tell them the problems they're facing, without hesitating or thinking what the health care professionals might feel of them. It is only then that correct treatment could be carried out. Consequently, even doctors need to give proper time to patients and explain them how to deal with problem until and unless the patient's concept. Often times doctors need to put in an extra effort while explaining the problems to patients who are illiterate and lack medical knowledge, to those patients who have a problem understanding the doctor's language or they themselves are of another language.

It is in such cases that miscommunication results the most. When multiple people are present in an interaction, the chances for misunderstanding and disagreements increase by a significant margin. Problems also occur when proper health care communication does not take place between the two parties. For instance, the doctor may advise a patient to stay in the hospital, whereas the patient might disregard the doctors advice and decide to go home. Such a scenario can lead to depression for the patient.

All this could have been avoided if the patient had communicated properly with the doctor and asked him his rationale for asking him to stay back (Kavanagh and Kennedy, 1992). Therapeutic communication refers to the use of communication to bring out a beneficial result for the client / patient. The main aim of therapeutic communication is to bring about a betterment is the patient's ability to lead a proper and problem life. Further on, therapeutic communication develops connectivity between the client and a health care professional, and this is something that can never be replaced by technology as it lack emotions.

Therapeutic