The Foundations of Effective Interprofessional and Patient Communication

Dear Colleagues,

As healthcare professionals, we spend more than 60% of our daily practice communicating with our colleagues and patients. This communication almost directly conditions the quality of care provided. Breakdown of interprofessional communication can alter the chain of care and its efficiency. Lame communication with the patient can result in their dissatisfaction, incomprehension, and nonadherence to the therapeutic plan. In all cases, suboptimal communication causes patient morbidity. Despite the importance of its quality and the significant amount of time spent in our daily practice communicating, communication continues to be little taught and explored. Thus, a description of the characteristics of good-quality communication and good communicative healthcare professional and research on tools to improve difficult communication would be useful in improving nonconstructive physician–patient partnerships and enhancing the entire healthcare system.

Communication reflects the emotional disposition of a person. A healthcare professional is regularly subjected to emotional overload during his daily practice, which can, indeed, be overwhelming and might saturate their entire cognitive load. The outcome of emotions is directly reflected in the quality of the care offered by a healthcare professional and their communication. One would rightly think that emotional intelligence, which is basically our awareness of the surrounding people’s emotions and control over our own emotions, also conditions the quality of communication.

Finally, many health professionals are also educators and teachers, and the quality of communication for teaching is important. It also affects the quality of learning, the feedback given to students, and the post-crisis debriefing. Thus, a student’s learning is a direct consequence of the quality of their teacher’s communication. With ineffective communication, only an unwanted hidden curriculum might be conveyed, instead of the teacher presenting themselves as a role model. This might result in suboptimal or even harmful learning.

This Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health aims to explore the several facets of communication between healthcare professionals and patients and its importance, teaching, and improvement when communication might seem difficult. This issue will also examine how the emotional intelligence of the healthcare professional impact the quality of their communication and provided care.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Issam Tanoubi
Guest Editor

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