Poor communications between health care workers contributed to 25% of hospital incidents that put patients’ safety at risk. Miscommunication was the sole cause of patient endangerment in 1 out of 10 cases. On average, about 1 in every 20 patients is exposed to preventable harm in health care.
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2025/04/15/uk-miscommunication-health-professionals-patient-rick-study/1391744733384/
12 Comments
I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-24-02904
From the linked article:
Miscommunication between hospital staff regularly puts patients at risk, a new study says.
Poor communications between health care workers contributed to 25% of hospital incidents that put patients’ safety at risk, researchers reported Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
What’s more, miscommunication was the sole cause of patient endangerment in 1 out of 10 cases, researchers found.
These cases included medication errors and medical errors that resulted in health-threatening events or near-misses, researchers said.
On average, about 1 in every 20 patients is exposed to preventable harm in health care, researchers said in background notes.
Im betting being overworked and many times having max 20min per patient doesnt help with this at all.
I always struggle to explain stuff and especially if youre medically complex or its an odd/unusual issue explaining that in 20 min is a feat. A
>Conclusion:
>Poor communication is a major cause of patient safety incidents. Research is needed to develop effective interventions and to learn more about how poor communication leads to patient safety incidents.
Now what exactly is supposed to be the *cause* of this “poor communication”? Overworked staff? Inexperienced staff?
Not a single word about this in the abstract and the full article is behind a paywall.
Can see hospital admin use studies like this to justify creation of more mandatory training modules
> Study heterogeneity precluded meta-analysis, so results were reported with narrative description…
This is only a review. They are unable to measure the effect size miscommunication had on any outcome.
So any statement that attempts to state what this effect size is (“25% of hospital safety incidents”) is erroneous.
You can’t estimate population statistics when your review concludes that the evidence base is too poor to accurately estimate population statistics.
In the U.S. I’d say the 1 in 20 number is way under estimated, the harm from almost every circumcision is preventable by not doing it in the first place, but tradition and profit have ways of convincing people to hurt others.
Although this is more of a communication/admitting harm problem from men who need to communicate the damage to healthcare professionals
Remember, complaining about accents is racist even if that person is the same race as you.
Word salad title: is it 25% of patient endangerment or 1 in 10 (aka 10%)?
Poor communication or unsafe staffing?
Staffing is horrible. If I’m literally running from one thing to the next while 5 people are all trying to talk to me at once and we have half the staff we need, what communication is there?
Most of my shifts I don’t even drink water because I don’t have time to even pee.
Oh yes, communication is a problem.
Staff our facilities properly how about that.
I suspect that the main reason for these miscommunications is understaffing, not incompetence.
Frightening but sadly unsurprising if you or a loved one has been in a hospital and tried to pay attention to what’s going on around you. It’s very jarring when you ask somebody on “your care team” a seemingly basic question and they don’t know the answer and when they tell you who does they say that person “probably” knows.
And some places are actually quite bad at keeping the actual patient informed too.
In Canada we hire a lot of Nursing staff from overseas. The Phillipines, India, China, etc.
Language isn’t really the barrier, but communication is. Exacting word use, heavy accents, cultural use of terminology.
No one likes to bring this up, but it’s very real in life or death situations where one word can make all the difference.