Nurse Witte Case Study Effective Communication

Nurse Witte struggles with many problems in this scenario; the most prominent of them is being able to effective communication. Effective communication has a positive impact on a patient’s health care outcome by working together with multi-disciplinary team members, in order to achieve this mutually beneficial goal. In order to develop a cohesive plan of care, it is important to have communication among all health care providers. Communication plays a vital role when involving multi-health care disciples to carry out a patient’s plan of care. In this critical thinking exercise with nurse Witte (Huber, 2014), I will review the problem she is faced with, how and what mode of communication and leadership strategies she should use to express
Nurse Witte is attempting to implement a new critical care pathway toward the improvement in quality care for recently discharged patients that are ventilator dependent. She is trying the multi-disciplinary approach of coordinating care with the nurses, doctors, home health care, and dieticians. These doctors are unwilling and resistant to the change of working with the information provided by a nurse. A failure in nurse -physician communication may lead to increased stress, potential errors in practice and possible negative outcomes (Eggertson, 2012). As opposed to dietary who is freely giving their information expecting the nurse to completely integrate their protocols, that may not have been expected by Nurse Witte. In addition, the inability to get in with the home health care agency that is assuming care of the patients follow the hospital discharge with is a lack of communication. In total, these problems demonstrate a lack of teamwork and communication which is the problem of everyone involved in the development of the critical care pathway. As a result of not working together, refusing to accept change, and a lack of communication, the patient’s plan of care will not be
An effective mode of communications that Nurse Witte could use to improve her situation would be through a negotiation. Through negotiation she will be better able to educate, and address the possible conflicts and concerns of the physicians on the roles that nurses take on the delivery of care for the patient, encouraging back and forth communication (Huber, 2014). By practicing this technique, she will be better able to improve communications standards with the home health care agency. Unfortunately, the agency has not returned her calls because they feel that their own needs require immediate attention as opposed to the patient care needs. It has been documented that several nursing institutions have had trouble with the inability to continue with their team or improvement process efforts losing momentum once the annual state regulatory survey was anticipated, even after written plans were accepted (Rantz et al., 2012). This agency may require a reminder that a patient’s health care needs come