Complex clinical communication practices: how do information receivers assimilate and act upon information for patient care?

Improving clinical communication is imperative to improving the quality and safety of patient care. Significant efforts have been made to improve clinical communication and patient safety, guided by the mantra of “the right information, to the right person, in the right place, at the right time”. The design and implementation of information communication technologies (ICTs) has been considered as one of the major developments in improving patient care. Clinical communication in today’s clinical practice is complex and involves multidisciplinary teams using different types of media for information transfer. This paper argues that traditional communication theories fail to adequately capture and describe contemporary clinical communicative practices or to provide insight into how information transferred is actually assimilated and/or utilised for patient care. This paper argues for the need to more fully consider underlying assumptions about the role of information in clinical communication and to recognise how the attributes of information receivers, especially where ICTs are deployed influence outcomes. The paper presents a discussion regarding the need to consider information receivers as the foundation for clinical communication improvement and future design and development of ICTs to improve patient care.