To Study Effectiveness & Impact of Doctor-Patient Communication in Healthcare Service-Delivery at Super-Specialty Hospital in Amritsar

Key to quality healthcare services depends on effective communication between patients and medical practitioners. Misunderstanding in healthcare decisions along with lack of patient knowledge, compliance, negative health outcome, dissatisfaction and increase risk of malpractice results from faulty communication among doctors and patients. Quality service delivery has different aspects for doctors, nurses and patients. However the communication aspect faces challenges of effective implementation and lot needs to be done to improve communication skills and thus strengthening interpersonal relations between the two. Towards this, the present survey study was carried to assess the experiences and challenges perceived by 238 patients and 20 doctors in effective communication. This study reveals (i) Patients found it easy to communicate with doctors regarding their treatment getting satisfactory health information from them, (ii) good participation of patients in health decision making, (iii) mainly socioeconomic backward sections of community fail to communicate freely, (iv) major reasons found for ineffective communication includes crowded and noisy work environment, lack of privacy, decreased consultation time, high inflow of patients, lack of health education, lack of staff and lack of support from hospital, (v) health awareness increases with increase in level of education.