ABSTRACT
Good communication between clinicians, patients, their families, carers and other professionals or agencies is crucial in the delivery of high-quality care. Effective communication between professionals and patients is inherent to a moral duty of beneficent care and in respecting patients' right to autonomy over their own treatment. Good communication includes a duty to offer patients: diagnosis and prognosis, including limits of knowledge; treatment options; implications and side-effects of treatment; main alternatives and the opportunity to ask questions. This chapter discusses the need for adequate, appropriate and individualised communication with older people. Professionals fail to see older people as individuals with individual values and communication needs, viewing them merely as a category - 'elderly people'. In complaints from the relatives of older patients, concerns are often raised that 'we were given no information/were not told what was going on' - even where the older patient was lucid and fully able to discuss their own care.
