ARTICLE
Effective Communication: Foundation for Nurse Safety By Rhonda Collins, DNP, RN, FAAN, Chief Nursing Officer, Vocera
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ver the past year, as we’ve all seen how nurses impact the health and healing of our world, we’ve also seen them embrace the mantra “Never Again” and leave the profession at an unprecedented rate. The need for change is clear. We must heed the call from all corners to listen to, support, and protect nurses.1 We must envision new ways of staffing and new ways of communicating and engaging, and focus on changing complex work environments and workflows – the source of most workplace fatigue and burnout. I have been researching, writing, and speaking on the topic of nurses’ cognitive burden for more than two years. I continue to be invited to talk about the cognitive burden and how it affects nurse safety. At every CNO roundtable, I attend, I meet nurse leaders who are perplexed and frustrated over how to fix what’s wrong. They are experiencing everything their staff
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is suffering and more, and they are asking for workable solutions. Often, nurse leaders focus primarily on building nurse resiliency. While resiliency is important, we also need to address the mental fatigue and moral injury this pandemic has wrought on our healthcare workers. It’s helpful to give people a safe place to go or a dedicated expert to talk to. There is nothing wrong with offering nurses space to meditate or listen to a mindfulness recording. But if nurses take five minutes every hour to go collect themselves and they come out of that space and the work environment is still chaotic, newfound serenity can’t be sustained. It’s not the nurse that needs to change. It’s the work environment. Nurses need tools to minimize the stress and make it easier to do their job. To this end, there are tangible actions nurse leaders can take to improve the work environment and strengthen nurse safety.
COMMUNICATION IS THE UNDERPINNING OF EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS IN A HOSPITAL, AND EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IS THE PRIMARY FOUNDATION OF A SAFE AND EFFECTIVE WORK ENVIRONMENT.
