ABSTRACT
It has long been recognized that good interpersonal communication is an essential skill forany healthcare worker. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 4, effective communication is central to the smooth running of the healthcare system as a whole. The care of patients now involves many different individuals, in part due to increasing specialization within the professions. This change is also partly due to an increase in patient mobility, which means that individuals no longer live in the same area for the whole of their life. Clinical encounters are supported by the efforts of many others who work away from patients, from laboratory and radiology staff through to administrators. These trends, amongst others, have significantly increased the need for healthcare workers to share information about patients and to discuss their management.
