Effective communication is key to excellent and efficient medical education projects, but it can often be challenging as medical education managers to communicate with healthcare professionals, or HCPs, due to a variety of factors. Medical education managers have the skills to develop excellent medical communications - but it is often the lack of time, resources, and information that result in challenges. For medical education managers aiming to enhance communications, understanding and addressing these common challenges is essential and key to developing a great project.
Communication Barriers in Healthcare
Challenges and barriers in healthcare communications might include conflicting priorities, technological limitations or language barriers. As a medical communications agency, CTC understands and has come up against many of these - but today, we focus on the challenges that medical education managers may experience when working on MedComms projects. After almost 30 years in the business, we’ve identified these challenges as a lack of time to communicate, working with limited resources and coming up against barriers that reduce access to information.
Time Constraints
A common challenge that often presents itself in healthcare communication is operating under time constraints. Medical education managers are often juggling busy schedules and multiple priorities, projects and stakeholders. This can result in rushed stakeholder engagement and incomplete information exchange between key parties. We often see this happen when unrealistic schedules are developed for a project, or the key performance indicators for a project aren’t identified at the start, resulting in a time crunch when people have to re-do entire components of the project to meet shifting goalposts.
Resource Limitations
Recently, there has been increased awareness about the struggle HCPs have when it comes to accessing resources, often due to diminished budgets or outdated technologies. This can be an issue for medical education managers who are hoping to engage HCPs using new technologies or communication methods. These limitations can hinder the efficient exchange of information and collaboration. When using digital resources, it's important that medical education managers first confirm with their stakeholders that the resources or platforms they are building for their project meet the needs and capabilities of the HCPs.
Inadequate Information Sharing
Another common communication challenge in healthcare is the lack of effective information sharing between HCPs, medical education managers and health organizations. This often happens when the key stakeholders in a project don’t first address their own expectations for the project, resulting in different teams on the project working towards different goals or outcomes. This also occurs when stakeholders don’t share pertinent information with others upon receiving it, forcing others to work off of old or outdated knowledge. These information silos can result in the medical education project containing incomplete or inaccurate information.
How to Develop Effective Communications Between Healthcare Professionals
To overcome these communication challenges, medical education managers can implement several strategies:
- Find and implement virtual technologies that are easy to access; for example, technologies that don’t require separate software downloads, log-ins that require HCPs to remember passwords, or are confusing to navigate. These technologies will streamline information sharing and collaboration.
- Prioritize stakeholder engagement by fostering a collaboration of open communication and collaboration; make sure all stakeholders know what is expected of them for their medical communications project at the outset.
- Build checklists and schedules that are available to all team members on a project to ensure everyone is aligned with expectations.
- Prioritize professional development by enrolling in an interpersonal communications or healthcare leadership course; these opportunities provide medical education managers with new tools and skills that can benefit your projects.
- Find a medical communications agency to alleviate the workload and manage stakeholders and other day-to-day operations.
By understanding and addressing the common communication challenges in healthcare, medical education managers can help their organizations improve communication practices, enhance collaboration among healthcare professionals, and ultimately, improve patient outcomes.
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