United States is one of the most diverse country today racially and ethnically. There are six races identify: white, American Indian, and Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander. And due to the different ethnic background of people, the emergency health care workers of hospitals faced lots communication challenges during encountered the patient. Emergency Department (ED) is the most sensitive area, where critical patient arriving to take the immediate care.
Hence, the emergency health care workers have no more time to know the every patients culture, behavior, alues and beliefs. They have to provide immediate medical care. So, here, communication between provider and patient is vital. The Effective communication and interpersonal skills of health care provider is required to deliver the high quality of care and patient satisfaction. An ineffective communication or misunderstanding between patient and provider leads to medical error and misdiagnosed the patient. The patient can’t get the right treatment on time.
As diversity increase, the communication issues also increases. The health care workers faced communication issues in the hospitals. Some of hallenges related to the different culture, beliefs, language and behavior. Thus, proper, trained and knowledgeable health care workers are needed in the emergency department of hospital to deal with the communication issues. The Problem Statement: The Health care field is becoming more complex today because of diversity and patients needs. Patients coming in the hospitals are from different ethnic background and they expect their care according to their beliefs or culture.
So, to understand various cultures and behavior is difficult for health care workers. The health care workers from emergency care department-facing hallenges related to the communication due to different ethnic background. Communication is the main tool to know each other. So, they have to understand communication challenge and work on it. “The patient satisfaction increased when members of the healthcare team took the problem seriously, explained information clearly, and tried to understand the patient’s experience, and provided viable options” (Thiedke CC, January, 2007).
The Purpose of the study: The main purpose of this qualitative study is to find out the communication challenges faced by emergency health care workers due to the different ethnic background. Further, to know the types of the communication issues and to find out the communication barriers. The Strategies used by emergency health care workers to deal with these types of issues, and knowledge about how to get training in the organization, and their future plan and to know the impacts of communication on health care because effective communication is necessary.
The study found that less than half of the hospitalized patients could identify their diagnoses or names of the medications at discharged, an indication of the ineffective communication with their physicians” (Makaryus, A. N. & Friedman, E. A. (2005). The Significance of the Study: The research study states that emergency health care workers need to understand the challenges and communication issues in the emergency department of hospitals due to the patients having different ethnic background.
The health care workers should learn the communication skills to achieve the effective communication and to deliver the high quality of care. Another significance of the study is that to provide the information on strategy and ways for decreasing the communication problems. The paper also presents the possible solutions on ommunication problems. Limitation of the study: It is the hypothetical analysis. There should be more participate can take part for well outcomes. Most of the participants give their answers in a positive way like they disclose some information about their organization.
Further, it is the descriptive research study because variety of data, information, theories and methodology used to research the topic. So, some kinds of bias in the study noted. The Research Questions: The health care workers from the emergency department facing lots of challenges related to the communication issues due to atients coming from diverse ethnic background. The emergency health care workers have no mo understand the patient’s culture and behavior, at that time identify the patient’s problem is the biggest challenge for them.
So, the goal of this study is to understand the challenges, communication issues and strategies to make the easy communication process between patients and health care workers. 1. What are the difficulties health care workers facing with patients encounters of various ethnical background? 2. What are the steps needed to be taken to tackle communication issues? 3. What are the governmental recommendations to esolved a communication issues faced by various organization? 4. What individual organizations do to bring the awareness or to educate the staff for dealing with communication issues?
5. What are the impacts of background and communication issues on health care workers? Assumption of the study: The first assumption is that the communications issues can be resolve by providing proper education and knowledgeable skills to health care workers. The second assumption is that accurate Interpreter can reduce the communication problems. Third assumption is that some of the electronic device used for ranslating the language in emergency. Definitions of terms: Communication: It is the process or act of sharing information, ideas, thoughts and feelings through words, signs, sounds or behavior.
Health care workers: Health care worker is someone who works in a hospitals or health centers (dictionary. reverso. net). Ethnic background: A social group characterized by a distinctive social and cultural tradition maintained from generation to generation, a common history and origin, and a sense of identification with the group (Medical dictionary). Diversity: The state of having peopled who are different races or who ave different cultures in a group or organization (Merriam- webster. om)
Emergency Department: An Emergency department (ED), also known as an accident & emergency department (A& E), emergency room (ER) or casualty department, is a medical treatment facility specializing in emergency medicine, the acute care of patients who present without prior appointment; either by their own means or by that of an ambulance (Google). Methodology: This is the qualitative research. The research is based on the research questions and the findings related with the communication issues due to the different ethnic background in mergency department.
The data collection is done from the document, theories and literature reviews present on the Internet, surveys and other qualitative methods. Somewhat ethnography method is used. It is the multi-method qualitative approach; its purpose is to provide a detailed, in-depth description of the research. An ethnographic understanding is developed through close exploration of several sources like participant observation, interviews, documents, newspapers, magazines articles or artifacts (Fielding, Nigel (2007). The study start with the generating the research questions and listed in a roper way.
Then, this question is asked to the emergency health care workers who are working in an emergency department of hospitals. The health care workers gave their answer as per their experience. The survey was generated by the investigator and finished by the study participants. The survey is included in the study instead of face-to-face interviews due to the limitation on time and participation by individual. The study uses a qualitative descriptive, analytical method to collect the information by surveying the health care workers in hospitals of Chicago metro area. The data collected from the ournal records, peer reviewed articles.
The strategies to used to collect data were through using Google scholar, Trine University library data search and typing the key words like communication issues in the hospitals, impacts of different ethnic background of patients, communication barriers, communication challenges in the emergency department. After collection of all the data, the researcher has analyzed those materials for usefulness of this study and based on that information we can get the possible solutions for the problems. And some of the solution selected from the similar problem elsewhere in the United States.
