One in ten patient safety incidents in hospitals due to poor communication

Patients’ lives are being put at risk by poor communication from health care professionals in hospitals worldwide, according to new research my colleagues and I conducted.

Our analysis included 46 studies, published between 2013 and 2024, involving over 67,000 patients across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia. And the findings are alarming. We discovered that poor communication was the sole cause of patient-safety incidents in over one in ten cases and contributed to causing incidents in one in four cases.

These aren’t just statistics, they represent real people harmed by preventable errors.

In one documented case, a doctor accidentally shut off a patient’s Amiodarone drip (a drug to treat heart arrhythmias) while silencing a beeping pump. The doctor failed to tell the nurse, and the patient’s heart rate spiked dangerously.

In another example, a patient died after a nurse failed to tell a surgeon that the patient was experiencing abdominal pains following surgery and had a low red blood cell count—clear indicators of internal bleeding. The patient later died from a hemorrhage that could have been prevented with adequate communication.

These findings confirm what many health care professionals have long suspected: communication breakdowns directly threaten patient safety. What’s particularly concerning is that these incidents cut across different health care systems worldwide.

The scale of the problem

In the UK alone, over 1,700 lives are lost annually due to medication errors, and at least 3 million deaths occur due to medication errors worldwide. At least half of these—often resulting from poor communication—are preventable.

In the US, communication failures contribute to over 60% of all hospital-based adverse events. Experts believe these figures probably underestimate the true extent of the problem as patient safety incidents are often underreported.

This research fills an important gap in our understanding. While previous studies had established that poor communication was an issue in health care settings, this is the first rigorous analysis to quantify precisely how communication lapses affect patient safety.

My colleagues and I also conducted a separate analysis of just the high-quality studies in the review, which yielded similar results, strengthening the validity of our findings.

The critical importance of effective communication has been highlighted in major health care investigations. Both the Francis and Ockenden Reports in the UK, which examined serious health care failures, cited ineffective communication as a cause of unnecessary deaths at the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, respectively.

Further emphasizing this point, the UK’s health ombudsman has identified poor communication as a contributing factor in about 48,000 avoidable sepsis deaths each year.

Inadequate communication doesn’t just make people feel bad in a nonspecific sense, it causes actual harm. Misunderstandings lead to grave medical errors through misdiagnosis, suboptimal treatments and potentially life-threatening complications.

Hope for improvement

Despite these sobering findings, we emphasize that communication can be improved through targeted interventions. When health care practitioners receive training to communicate with additional empathy toward their patients, their empathic behavior improves—and so do patient outcomes.

Similarly, when health care professionals are taught to communicate more effectively with colleagues, measurable improvements follow.

One notable study found that implementing a structured communication protocol in surgical teams reduced adverse events by 23% over a year. Another demonstrated that using standardized handoff procedures between shifts decreased medical errors by nearly 30%.

These communication interventions often take as little as half a day to implement and are likely to be highly cost-effective. For a relatively small investment in training, health care systems could see significant reductions in preventable harm.

The evidence is in. It’s time for health care leaders, educators and policymakers to act. Communication training must become a universal standard—not an optional extra—in safeguarding patient lives.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.