Enhancing Patient Safety Through Effective Interprofessional Communication: A Focus on Medication Error Prevention

BACKGROUND

Medication errors significantly impact patient safety and healthcare costs. This study investigates the influence of interprofessional communication on medication error rates, with a focus on identifying actionable strategies to improve communication efficacy among healthcare professionals.

METHODS

Utilizing a quantitative approach, this research distributed a detailed online questionnaire to a broad cohort of healthcare workers in various settings within Saudi Arabia. The survey encompassed sections on demographics, the frequency and quality of interprofessional communication, perceived barriers and facilitators to effective communication, and personal experiences with medication errors. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS to derive descriptive and inferential statistics, alongside thematic analysis for qualitative responses.

RESULTS

The survey attracted 1165 respondents, predominantly aged 20-30 (68.58%) and female (65.49%). Pharmacists constituted the largest professional group (40.34%). We identified a notable positive correlation (r = 0.16) between high-quality interprofessional communication and employment in hospital environments or having 5-20 years of experience. In contrast, negative correlations were observed with employment in non-traditional healthcare settings (r = -0.19) and professionals with less than five years of experience (r = -0.13), indicating communication challenges. The analysis also highlighted a concerning frequency of prescription and dispensing errors, with 52.70% of participants reporting prescription errors as the most common issue encountered.

CONCLUSION

Effective interprofessional communication is pivotal in mitigating medication errors within healthcare settings. The study illuminates specific areas for improvement, including the need for targeted communication training, particularly for less experienced professionals and those in non-traditional settings. Enhancing communication channels and fostering an environment conducive to open, interdisciplinary dialogue are essential steps towards advancing patient safety and reducing medication errors.

The Impact of Personal Protective Equipment on Cognitive and Emotional Aspects of Health Care Work

OBJECTIVE

Personal protective equipment (PPE) is critical to the safety of health professionals and vital to clinical practice. However, there is little known about the cognitive and emotional impact of PPE on health professionals' performance, comfort, and well-being.

METHODS

A mixed-method, cross-sectional, observational study was adopted. An online survey consisting of 5-point Likert scale questions and free-text comments canvassed the opinions of patient-facing health professionals.

RESULTS

An overall negative impact of PPE on health professionals' ability to carry out work was found from 185 responses from medicine, nursing, and allied health disciplines, including increased fatigue, poor communication, and feeling uncomfortable.

CONCLUSIONS

There are significant negative impacts of PPE on health professionals' ability to carry out work, impairing communication, task efficiency, and comfort. Personal protective equipment is an essential infection control practice requiring further research, design, and testing to overcome challenges.

Translating and Adapting the DISCERN Instrument Into a Simplified Chinese Version and Validating Its Reliability: Development and Usability Study

BACKGROUND

There is a wide variation in the quality of information available to patients on the treatment of the diseases afflicting them. To help patients find clear and accessible information, many scales have been designed to evaluate the quality of health information, including the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool; the Suitability Assessment of Materials for evaluation of health-related information for adults; and DISCERN, an instrument for judging the quality of written consumer health information on treatment choices. These instruments are primarily in English. Few of them have been translated and adapted into simplified Chinese tools for health information assessment in China.

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to translate and adapt DISCERN into the first simplified Chinese version and validate the psychometric properties of this newly developed scale for judging the quality of patient-oriented health information on treatment choices.

METHODS

First, we translated DISCERN into simplified Chinese using rigorous guidelines for translation and validation studies. We tested the translation equivalence and measured the content validity index. We then presented the simplified Chinese instrument to 3 health educators and asked them to use it to assess the quality of 15 lung cancer-related materials. We calculated the Cohen κ coefficient and Cronbach α for all items and for the entire scale to determine the reliability of the new tool.

RESULTS

We decided on the simplified Chinese version of the DISCERN instrument (C-DISCERN) after resolving all problems in translation, adaptation, and content validation. The C-DISCERN was valid and reliable: the content validity index was 0.98 (47/48, 98% of the items) for clarity and 0.94 (45/48, 94% of the items) for relevance, the Cronbach α for internal consistency was .93 (95% CI 0.699-1.428) for the whole translated scale, and the Cohen κ coefficient for internal consistency was 0.53 (95% CI 0.417-0.698).

CONCLUSIONS

C-DISCERN is the first simplified Chinese version of the DISCERN instrument. Its validity and reliability have been attested to assess the quality of patient-targeted information for treatment choices.

Analysis of Turkish Veterinary Students' Self-perception of Communication Competencies Based on Gender Differences

Communication skills are teachable and learnable skills, which have a vital position among other clinical skills because a student's ability to communicate can increase empathy. The focus of this article is to determine how senior students evaluate themselves regarding communication competence and whether gender has an impact on their perception. The study included 128 volunteering students, using the Communication Competence Scale, consisting of 30 questions, as a data collection tool and the independent samples t-test for statistical evaluations. The evaluation of all participants showed that male participants had the highest score, and female participants had the lowest. However, there was no statistically significant difference between female and male participants' total scores (p = 0.605). There was a statistically significant difference between female and male students in terms of the social competency, empathy, and adaptability. Female scores for empathy were statistically higher than those of males. Male students scored themselves higher than females in terms of social competency and adaptability. In the context of the students' perceptions of their communication competence, it was determined that females assessed themselves to be more empathetic and males perceived themselves to be more social and adaptable. This research is significant as it is the first study of Turkish veterinary students' self-perception of communication competence. Communication training may become more robust in veterinary curricula in Turkey, and further research will be affected by this issue.

Türk Veteriner Fakültesi Öğrencilerinin İletişim Yeterlikleri Algısının Cinsiyet Farklılıklarına Göre Analizi

İletişim becerileri, bir öğrencinin iletişim kurma yeteneği ile empati becerisini arttırabilmesi nedeniyle diğer klinik beceriler arasında önemli bir yere sahip olan öğretilebilir ve öğrenilebilir becerilerdir. Bu çalışmanın amacı, veteriner fakültesi son sınıf öğrencilerinin iletişim konusunda kendilerini nasıl değerlendirdiklerini ve cinsiyetin bu algı üzerinde bir etkisi olup olmadığını belirlemektir. Çalışma 128 gönüllü öğrenci ile 30 sorudan oluşan İletişim Yeterlilik Ölçeği kullanılarak gerçekleştirilmiş, bağımsız örneklemlerde t-testi ile istatistiksel değerlendirme yapılmıştır. Yapılan değerlendirmeye göre, tüm katılımcılar arasında erkeklerin en yüksek puanı, kadınlar en düşük puanı aldığı görülmüştür. Ancak kadın ve erkeklerin toplam puanları arasında istatistiksel olarak anlamlı fark bulunamamıştır (p=0.605). Kadın ve erkekler arasında sosyal yeterlilik, empati yeterliği ve uyum yeterliği açısından anlamlı fark bulunmuştur. Kadınlar empati yeterliğinde, erkekler ise sosyal yeterlilik ve uyum yeterliğinde daha yüksek puan almıştır. İletişim yeterlikleri algısı bakımından kadınlar kendilerini daha empatik, erkekler ise daha sosyal ve uyumlu bulmuştur. Bu çalışma Türk veteriner fakültesi öğrencilerinin iletişim yeterlikleri konusunda öz algılarını yansıtan ilk çalışma olması bakımından önemlidir. İletişim becerileri eğitimi Türkiye’de veteriner fakülteleri müfredatında daha güçlü hale gelecek ve bu konu ileri araştırmaların yapılmasını teşvik edecektir.

Arts-Based Interventions for Professionals in Caring Roles During and After Crisis: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Crisis events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can have a devastating effect on communities and the care professionals within them. Over recent years, arts-based interventions have helped in a wide range of crisis situations, being recommended to support the workforce during and after complex crisis but there has been no systematic review of the role of arts-based crisis interventions and whether there are cogent themes regarding practice elements and outcomes. We, therefore, conducted a systematic review to (i) define the arts-based change process used during and after crisis events, and (ii) explore the perceptions of intermediate and long-term mental health benefits of arts-based interventions for professionals in caring roles. Our search yielded six studies (all qualitative). All data were thematically aggregated and meta-synthesized, revealing seven practice elements (a safe place, focusing on strengths and protective factors, developing psychosocial competencies to support peers, emotional expression and processing, identifying and naming the impact of the crisis, using an integrative creative approach, and cultural and organizational sensitivity) applied across all six studies, as well as a range of intermediate and long-term benefits shared common features (adapting, growing, and recovering; using the community as a healing resource; reducing or preventing symptoms of stress or trauma reactions, psychophysiological homeostasis). The ways in which these studies were designed independently from one another and yet used the same practice elements in their crisis interventions indicates that there is comparability about how and why the arts-based practice elements are being used and to what effect. Our findings provide a sound basis and meaningful parameters for future research incorporating quantitative and qualitative approaches to firmly establish the effectiveness of art-based interventions, and how arts can support cultural sensitivity, acceptability and indicated outcomes, particularly those relating to stress and trauma during or following a crisis.

The Brazilian Portuguese Version of the DISCERN Instrument: Translation Procedures and Psychometric Properties

OBJECTIVES

To report on the translation procedures and psychometric properties of the DISCERN tool in Brazilian Portuguese.

METHODS

Three people translated the DISCERN from English into Brazilian Portuguese. A committee of experts and community representatives evaluated the quality of the 3 versions in 2 online voting rounds. Two native speakers back-translated the questionnaire into English. We compared these versions to the original DISCERN and made small adjustments. The final Brazilian Portuguese version of DISCERN was tested twice by journalism students to evaluate the quality of a text about smoking cessation treatments. We evaluated participants' health literacy with the Short Assessment of Health Literacy for Portuguese-Speaking Adults (SAHL-PA) tool, assessed the internal consistency of the translated questionnaire with the Cronbach test, and measured its reproducibility with the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). We then investigated the relationship between DISCERN and SAHL-PA scores and demographic variables.

RESULTS

The participants (n = 126) had no difficulty in using the questionnaire. Cronbach's alpha was 0.865 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.826-0.898), and the ICC between the 2 evaluations was 0.845 (CI 0.717-0.912). The mean health literacy of the participants was adequate. There was no correlation between the DISCERN score and the SAHL-PA score, age, or sex (P > .05).

CONCLUSIONS

The Brazilian Portuguese version of the DISCERN questionnaire has excellent internal consistency and good reproducibility. The evaluators' ages, sex, and health literacy did not interfere with the score resulting from the evaluation of the quality of the text.

A communication skills intervention to minimise patient perpetrated aggression for healthcare support workers in New Zealand: A cluster randomised controlled trial

Healthcare support workers face challenging situations in their day-to-day work but may have minimal training on how to deal with such incidents. Although staff training is often recommended as an essential part of any comprehensive approach for preventing and managing workplace violence, there is paucity of evidence on the content and effectiveness of such training. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of an intervention (communication skills training) to reduce the experience of aggression for healthcare support workers. A two arm, cluster randomised, single-blinded, controlled trial among healthcare support workers in nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and District Health Boards (DHBs) in New Zealand was conducted. The trial was conducted across 14 NGOs and DHB in Otago, Southland, and Auckland regions of New Zealand. One hundred and twenty-seven participants were randomised to one of two groups. Both the intervention (communication skills) and control condition (mindfulness) were group-based, fully scripted, and structured training interventions that consisted of four once weekly workshops that were facilitated by one of two nonclinical facilitators. Measurements of perceived aggression, psychological well-being, and distress and communication competence were taken pre-, post-, 3 months' post-, and 6 months' postintervention. There was a significant drop in the rate of aggression over time with a mean score and standard deviation of 10.37 (9.169) at baseline dropping to 6.07 (6.923) for the Perception of Patient Aggression Scale-New Zealand across both intervention and control. Equivalent results were noted with increased psychological well-being and communication competence and decreased distress with both interventions. This was sustained at 6 months' follow-up. However, the between groups effect did not demonstrate a statistically significant difference between the intervention and control groups. Both mindfulness and communication skills training can reduce the experience of aggression reported by healthcare support workers.