FACTORS RETARDING THE EFFICACY OF NURSING COMMUNICATION IN HOSPITALS AND STRATEGIES TO OVERCOME THEM

With the globalisation and rapid increase in competitiveness of the economy, emphasis on improving the quality of care and services provided by the hospitals has enlarged. Hospitals are increasingly showing interest in expansion of effective internal communication in regard to nurses because nurses are the lifeline of hospitals in terms of patient care, pivotal in hospital efforts to gain credibility and improving the working efficiency of hospitals, so it is necessary to communicate with them timely, effectively, precisely and clearly. In the lieu of aforesaid factors, the aim of the study is to understand the communication obstacles faced by nurses in their duties in their hospital context and suggest the possible measures to reduce the communication gaps. To gather the information, data was collected from the nurses working in hospitals of Jaipur, through semi-structured interviews. Nurses were selected on the basis of their experience level, maturity and seniority for the study. The result of the study clearly brought out certain hindrances in internal communication among nurses and hospital management as change in work shifts, lack of work team involvement, strong opposition to change, fragmented work processes, poor senior-subordinates relationship, poor interpersonal relationship and job burnout.Thus, the results depicts that the communication among the hospitals are not always successful leading to more of confusion and performance deficits. To overcome the lacunae’s in effective communication among the management and nurse’s large number of lectures and conferences should be organized to impart training to the nurses and management staff to make them understand the role and importance of the communication and adverse effects of communication gaps on their job quality and the performance of the hospitals. Moreover, the factors that retard the smooth flow of communication in the hospitals should be eliminated or corrected. More stress should be given on face to face verbal communication. Above all, suggestions should be taken from nurses itself to suggest possible measures to enhance internal communication in the hospitals as they are most close and continuously working round the clock to provide their services to the patients and hospitals. Thus, effective communication is crucial for success of almost all the organizations to survive and excel in the economy.