Fixable: Kelli - "How do I deal with a communication breakdown?"
TEDx Shorts
In this episode of Fixable, hosts Anne Morriss and Frances Frei advise Kelli, a nurse at a teaching hospital, on addressing severe communication breakdowns between doctors, nurses, and specialists that are compromising patient care. The hosts
Key takeaways
- Kelli explains that miscommunication between consulting teams (e.g., heart failure, surgical, infectious disease) leads to uncoordinated orders, increased patient anxiety, and compromised care in cardiovascular units.
- Frances Frei identifies two primary breakdowns: a lack of transparency about the 'why' behind medical decisions, and failures ensuring everyone on the team actually hears critical updates.
Main topics
- Healthcare communication breakdowns
- Transparency in medical decision-making
Notable quotes
"If the people who are making life-altering decisions for these people are not all on the same page, these people aren't going to receive good care."
Conclusion
The episode demonstrates how frontline workers can overcome bureaucratic
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) Support comes from WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global. Your money should be too. Some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers. Don't be fooled. Extra costs often hide in bloated exchange rates. Choose WISE. You can send, spend and receive money in over 40 currencies. Count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get WISE. Visit WISE.com. Decencies apply. Speaker 3 (0:32) Hi there. We are not Atosa, and this is not TEDxShorts, but we hope you'll stay with us. I'm Anne Morris. And I'm Frances Fry. And this is something a little different. This is an episode of Fixable, our new show from the TED Audio Collective. Speaker 4 (0:47) We really hope you enjoy it. And if you do, you can find and follow Fixable wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. Speaker 3 (0:56) This is a new segment we like to call Anne and Frances' Favorite Icebreakers. We do a lot of work with teams and we try to get them to start communicating honestly very quickly. So we think a lot about what are the questions at the beginning of meetings that really create an environment where people can have an honest dialogue. A low stakes one I often use is tell us about a piece of art that means something to you. Speaker 4 (1:21) Oh, good. I'll tell you the one that moves me the most. And it's a photograph. that our dear friend Emmy took when she was visiting us. And our oldest son was two or three. On the weekend, we took him to the classrooms at the Harvard Business School. Not break into the classroom. Speaker 3 (1:37) Not break in. I mean, it's really an overstatement. But find our way Speaker 4 (1:39) into the classrooms, which have just magnificent layers and layers of boards. And we would rearrange the furniture a little bit so that he could stand on it and draw. Such a light footprint. No one ever knew we were there. But there's this one particular picture. where he's standing on the desk that's pushed up against it, and he's drawing, and his head is tilted as if he is an experienced artist looking up at the work, like he's appraising it. But we can only see him from behind, but we can see you and I from the side, and we're also joining him in the gaze. And so all three of us are sharing a gaze, and I don't know why it's so powerful to me, but it is my favorite piece of art. So thank you, Emmy, for that. And thanks for letting me think about that. I love it too. Speaker 3 (2:30) All right. I'm Anne Morris. I'm a company builder and leadership coach, and I'm here with my wife. Speaker 4 (2:35) And that would be me. I'm Frances Fry, and I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School. And Speaker 3 (2:39) you're listening to Fixable. This is a podcast where we work very hard to fix work problems Speaker 4 (2:45) fast. And by fast, we mean hopefully in less than 30 minutes. Speaker 3 (2:49) That's the goal. Many of our listeners know that this has been a dream of ours for years to have a podcast, an excuse to talk to each other. It's a date. Once a week. I'm so excited to dive in with our first fixable caller. Who is she? Her name is Kelly. She's a nurse in a cardiovascular acute care unit at a teaching hospital. We won't say which one, but it's a very high stakes job. Takes a lot of work and a tremendous amount of commitment and generosity. Speaker 4 (3:22) Oh my goodness. Such important work. Do we know what Kelly's calling about? Speaker 3 (3:27) Yeah, so Kelly says patient care, it takes a ton of coordination, as you can imagine, between lots of different people and teams. And she's really feeling like the communication among all of these people and teams is really suffering right now. Speaker 2 (3:43) I work in a place where you've got doctors, you've got nurses, you've got a whole bunch of people, and sometimes there's really poor communication, and it leads to resentment and animosity, and ultimately it comes down to quality of patient care. If the people who are making life-altering decisions for these people are not all on the same page, these people aren't going to receive good care, and it's going to be Speaker 3 (4:12) extremely... extremely frustrating. Speaker 2 (4:13) And I just, I want to know how to help foster an environment that that can be overcome. Speaker 4 (4:21) Wow. Patient care, I mean, over the last two years, this is the most important industry on the planet. And so I look forward to diving in and finding out how do we fix communication problems that could have real health outcomes? Speaker 3 (4:37) Yeah, I mean, communication, it's a universal problem in organizations made more difficult by hierarchies, which we sometimes have to put in place, particularly in environments with high stakes outcomes. And so I'm super motivated to try to be useful here. I'm Speaker 4 (4:53) super excited as well. Speaker 1 (5:07) Support comes from WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global. Your money should be too. Some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers. Don't be fooled. Extra costs often hide in bloated exchange rates. Choose WISE. You can send, spend and receive money in over 40 currencies. Count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get WISE. Visit WISE.com. Decencies apply. Speaker 3 (5:41) Kelly, thank you so much for doing this with us. Of course. Thank you for reaching out to me. Speaker 4 (5:45) Yeah, we're really thrilled. We're really thrilled. Speaker 3 (5:48) And let me start there with what would make this conversation most useful to you? Speaker 2 (5:54) So I work in a unit where lots of the patient population that I have, they are cardiac specific patients in the hospital I work at. They are the sickest people I can work with without being in the ICU. So the issue that I really have is that you've got doctors, you've got nurses, you've got nursing assistants, and then like x-ray techs and phlebotomists, just all these different teams. And everyone needs to work together to be this cohesive group. But a lot of the time, the nurses ended up being the middleman for everybody. And they're trying to manage their own specific things. And really just poor communication is what it comes down to, specifically between nurses and doctors, that leads to poor patient outcomes, ultimately. Speaker 3 (6:40) When you think about where communication is breaking down most frequently, is there a specific level or is it happening at all of these levels? Speaker 2 (6:50) I think it happens at all levels. There's also often a disconnect. If you have... a patient who has different teams consulting, you know, whether that's the heart failure team and we have a surgical team and we have an infectious disease team and all of these people might be consulting on a patient. Speaker 2 (7:13) And someone's putting in orders from one team, but the team