Assessing and Improving Communication in Cancer Services
Why we developed the Communication Audit Tool
This Audit Tool was developed by the Communications Sub-group of the
YCN User Partnership Group. It was developed in response to feedback
from service users' experiences of people and services and their
desire to improve communication between professionals and users.
It has been designed for use in a variety of clinical settings. It
can be used to assess a number of contexts in which communication is
important: clinic reception, out-patients, diagnostic procedures,
nursing and medical consultations would all be examples of where
the tool could be used.
How to use it
Questions were developed from issues raised by service users
and have been through a series of consultations with various
groups of users and service providers. Because this tool is
still in its development please DO NOT ALTER QUESTIONS WHEN YOU USE IT.
We want your feedback about how the measure performs (questionnaire below)
and when we have collected experiences of the tool in use (which will include
what questions need altering) we will review all the questions and alter as necessary.
We suggest that users of the tool do not try to answer too many questions in one go!
The tool is deliberately short and "user-friendly" so it may be better to
set up a series of small projects rather than one big one. As an example,
if you wanted to evaluate a patient's experience of communications in outpatients,
they may have a series of face-to-face contacts with six or seven people - to try
to capture all this on one questionnaire is unlikely to give meaningful answers.
In this case you may want to focus on specific professional groups (e.g. reception
staff, nurses, doctors) at different times to maximise the usefulness of the data.
Feedback
Please let us know if there are any problems with using this
tool or if you would like to discuss its use. Please complete
the short questionnaire below and return to us.
