The five barriers to effective communication include conflicting belief systems, conflicting interests, mismatches in communication, negative relationships and poor credibility.
Three methods of consulting with stakeholders include nominal group technique, structure interviews and open-ended interviews. The latter’s objective is to get responses to complicated issues and although it tackles complicated issues, it is affected by the interviewing techniques of the interviewer. Structure interviews serve the same objective but are time consuming. Nominal group technique seeks to increase participants’ participation, is easy to learn but there is no interaction among ideas.
The National Cancer Institute’s Patient-centered communication model differs from the sender-receiver model because the former is more complicated and requires almost simultaneous feedbacks as opposed to the latter which can only serve one patient at a time. It is also specialized because it includes health outcomes.
The concept of ‘contagion’ helps explain how information spreads by mapping or modeling the concept of a network of social groups.
Leaders need to take note of organizational politics because all stakeholders have interests which should be effectively managed.
Managers can use negotiation, competition of collaboration. These strategies would best be applicable in structural power struggles.
Seven- Specific ways of limiting potential for power abuse include establishing a strong code of ethics, emphasizing on integrity of persons, creating greater transparency through structuring communication networks, putting in place appropriate appraisal systems and establishing boards of directors who limit the authority of the management. Some human resource strategies would include collaboration, research, logrolling and forming coalitions.
Collaborative or competitive strategies are used depending on the situation or the nature of health care issues. Some of the situations are cases where the conflicting parties belong to different employment statuses (such as physician and administrator) or the healthcare organization is very big.
In thinking about power relationships unique to healthcare organizations, some of the challenges to would include the power differences. For instance, the patient may feel incapacitated to negotiate even in cases where his or her rights were trampled simply because he or she is afraid of the physician.