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Communication Within the Nhs

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1. The National Health Service (NHS) is a publicly funded service, providing free health care for all British citizens. ‘Since its launch in 1948, the NHS has grown to become the world’s largest publicly funded health service’ together with one of the largest employers in the world’. However throughout the past decade the demand for health care has been rising radically and with the continuous need to be accountable for public spending the NHS has been put under immense pressure to be cost effective at the same time as achieving their prime objective of improving the standard of care (NHS Choices, 2010).

1.1 Human resource management is crucial to the success of this goal since it identifies the increasing recognition that health care…show more content…
Ignorance of these differences may lead to offending an employee, leading to unintentional discrimination and poor relationships. It would therefore be beneficial for human resource management to understand culture disparities that may affect the way in which a message is perceived (Culturaldiversisty.org, 2008). Cultural diversity not only causes interferences within verbal communication but also in the way non-verbal communication is perceived. In relation to the cultural variations within non-verbal communication, body language is often misconstrued. For example when the British are talking face to face they ‘tend to look away spasmodically’, in contrast to this the Norwegians ‘typically look people steadily in their eyes without altering their gaze,’ thus a British individual communicating with a Norwegian could portray this eye contact as threatening and a wrong perception of that person may be perceived (Mullins, 2005, p231).

3.1 As the prime objective of the NHS care system is to provide optimal care for all UK citizens, and with a multicultural country as our own, cultural competence ought to be manifested at every level within the NHS organization to ensure there are no damaging effects. Missunderstandings may lead to missdiagonosis, thus practitioners and nurses along with managers should all be culturaly aware. (Cultural diversisty.org, 2007) Portsmouth hospital’s NHS trust’s ethnic health coordinator highlights this
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