The Impact Of Communication Between Nurse And Patient And Its Role In Resulting Medical Errors

Abstract

Medical errors are a significant patient safety risk in healthcare systems and Saudi Arabia is not an exception where communication failure is one of the frequent causes. Nonetheless, there was a gap in terms of solid, quantitative research on a connection between the quality of the nurse-patient communication and the errors rate in this particular cultural and linguistic setting. This gap was filled by this correlational study which aimed at exploring how nurse-patient communication influences medical errors in three Saudi hospitals. The provided data were obtained using validated questionnaires, which were administered to 200 nurse-patient dyads as the measure of perceived communication quality and self-reported communication-related errors. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that the most significant predictors were communication variables that added another 41 percent of variance in the number of errors once the demographics had been controlled. Nurse communication scores were found to have a strong negative relationship with the frequency of an error (r = -0.71, p < 0.01). Importantly, the difference in perception affecting nurse and patient ratings was a predictor of errors independently (33.0, 0.01). Medical mistakes were much higher in the surgical wards and of language discordance. The findings present empirical data to confirm that the quality of the nurse-patient communication is a measurable predictor of patient safety. The results highlight the importance of the introduction of the dyad-oriented communication training and the effective language support services to reduce avoidable injuries in Saudi clinical environments.