Huang, Y., & Garrett, S. (2012). Defining characteristics of communication quality in culture-changeed long-term healthcare facilities. Journal of Commnunication in Healthcare, 5(4), 227-238.
This paper will in tell the defining characteristics of communication quality in culture-change long term healthcare facilities. What will first be discussed is the purpose of why this research was conducted by the two people Yuan-Han Huang and Sandra K. Garrett. Furthermore, I will summarize more about the article with the importance of this study and how they conducted their research. This research is yet something that is very helpful to learn and experience. I feel like Yuan-Han Huang and Sandra K. Garrett were really concerned with the communication in healthcare facilities so that is why they wanted to conduct a study as such. However, according to the article, this research was conducted because within any healthcare facility, inter-staff communication plays a significant role of the healthcare delivery and on many of the patients’ outcomes. It has been discovered that communication within the healthcare facilities are extremely limited and are well effected. For their study they want to investigate the inter-staff communication patterns and characteristics that are somewhat based on the roles that the staff play in a culture-changed nursing home. There seemed to be some poor communication between medical staff and it was really something that was considered a waste of time because it was doing nothing but threaten the patients and leaving bad results. This study was very helpful to study because the communication was something that needed to be fixed in order to not have so many deaths in injury in the healthcare facility. Both researchers believe that management within the facility should be the head mediator in organizing the series of communication policies that can do both achieve and satisfy the staff’s communication preferences. Moreover, they want to be able to make sure the workflow is maintained efficiently and that the resident’s quality of life in the healthcare facility was long-term care. With the study they used three methods to get findings of how the communication works in culture change healthcare facilities; assessment of communication quality, questionnaire design, and a survey. The assessment of communication quality was used for the measuring of the organizational communication with the five dimensions of communication quality which are timeliness, accuracy, openness, effectiveness and understanding. The questionnaire design was to see the structure of the survey to investigate the communication preferences at a culture-changed, long-term care facility. This design consisted of four sections; 1. Demographic information, 2. The frequency of using various modalities for exchanging information within the facility, 3. Rank the perception of importance of five dimensions of communication quality, 4. Prioritize the three most preferred communication modalities to achieve 10 scenarios. The survey they used was sent out to all staff. It was a web based questionnaire that was distributed to a non-profit, culture-changed nursing home in South Carolina in January 2010. To get people to participate in the survey, they organized a drawing for an incentive gift certificate for $25. What the researchers found in the demographic information was that 46 participants responded to the survey which represented an actual response rate of 23% of the staff in the facility. They also found out that by investigating the duties and responsibilities within the facility, the 46 staff that responded were grouped into five role categories which were nurse, companion, therapy, service and management. For the second part of the questionnaire, the usage of communication modalities within the facilities was investigated. Findings were, face to face, email and phone communications are the most popular communication techniques.