THE IMPERATIVE OF MEDICAL COMMUNICATION

The Imperative of Medical Communication
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The Imperative of Medical Communication
Development of Communication within Healthcare
Communication is a fundamental aspect of healthcare delivery since it underpins all other medical interventions. The reason is that healthcare providers use communication process to gain their patient’s compliance while patients use the process to relay their stories of illness accurately to their providers. As defined by Polack and Avtgis (2011), medical communication refers to the pragmatic technique to the daily navigation through, and all the interpersonal encounters between patients and their healthcare providers. The development of communication in the healthcare field has been studied extensively for the past forty years. A report by the Agency for Healthcare Quality Research in the year 2007 stated that most people die due to misinformation rather than diseases while in the hospitals.
Communication within healthcare has evolved over the years from the time of Hippocrates (400 B.C) where healthcare providers were urged to establish trust with the patients so that they could share their problems without fear. In those days, the main method of communication was verbal where the patient had to meet the doctor face-to-face so that he or she can share his or her problems. However, in today’s world, this has greatly changed with the advancements in technology and medicine since patients can rece…