Hospitals and healthcare organizations have unique needs when it comes to internal communication. They are large and complex organizations where the stakes are high – if the proper information isn’t sent and received well internally, it can literally mean the difference between life and death.
According to research cited by The Joint Commission, poor communication contributes to over 60% of adverse events in US hospitals. An analysis of 23,000 medical malpractice lawsuits found that more than 7,000 were linked to communication failures. This resulted in $1.7 billion in malpractice costs and nearly 2,000 preventable deaths.
Inefficient systems and processes might be holding your hospital or healthcare organization back from reaching its full potential with internal communications. It's worth taking stock of your current systems to identify opportunities for improvement and overcome the most common challenges in healthcare communication.
Download free infographic – "Effective internal communication in healthcare"
Hospitals and healthcare organizations can be large or small. They’re sometimes spread over multiple campuses. Staff work across different disciplines and on different shifts around the clock. The pace of work is often fast.
Healthcare organizations face persistent operational pressures: workforce shortages, rising patient demand, and the ongoing challenge of communicating across multiple sites and shifts. Keeping all employees informed in this type of environment is a challenge at the best of times.
The bulk of employees in a hospital and healthcare environment don’t have jobs where they sit at their desks in an office all day. Medical staff are in wards, consultation rooms, or operating theatres dealing with patients. Some even work off-site and go to people’s homes, such as nursing staff, meaning this workforce can have a mobile aspect.
Other challenges in healthcare communication include delays in communication between nurses and physicians, which can lead to poor patient outcomes. Alarm fatigue - where there are beeps and bells sounding off all the time due to the nature of the healthcare environment - can mean that employees “tune out” to important alarms, which is also a problem.
In this sector, people are still quite reliant on devices like pagers, which function in parts of hospitals that mobile phones can’t reach (because they are designed to block X-rays). And IT infrastructure isn’t always reliable.
Funding is always an issue in the healthcare sector… There are limited funds to go around, and quite often, investing in internal communications is seen as “non-essential” even though it can have a profound effect on patient outcomes. Encouraging management and finance teams to see the importance of investing in internal communication improvement is a challenge in and of itself.
All of this makes traditional communication methods, such as email, even more challenging in this sector. Around the world, across a variety of industries, email overload has become a really big problem for communicators as employees are burdened by so many emails hitting their inboxes every day, they don’t have time to open them all. This means important information is missed.
It’s one of the worst communication problems in healthcare.
For the healthcare industry, the email open rate is just 39% with a click through rate of just 6%.
This means if you’re sending an email with a hyperlink to important information - such as policy and procedure changes – it’s getting missed by most employees.
Employees don’t have the luxury of sitting in front of their computers and reading all their emails every day, so when they have the opportunity to check their emails, they’ll scroll through them and filter for what they think is important.
For example, they may read everything sent by a particular specialist because they will assume it is important, and overlook things that don’t interest them, such as directives about employee parking. They may not open alerts from IT about system maintenance, meaning they miss important information about outages and aren’t prepared for the impact it will have on patients and services.
Hospitals and healthcare organizations deal with emergency situations every day, and having systems and processes in place to deal with that is a given. Hospitals often use a color code system to determine what an issue is and what has affected it.
Other times, there are emergency and crisis situations that are out of the ordinary that hospitals need to be prepared to respond to. There can be large-scale emergency events with mass casualties that impact the hospital, for example when dealing with a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.
Major infectious disease outbreaks — including the COVID-19 pandemic — have demonstrated exactly this: when situations escalate rapidly, and without warning, facilities that lacked robust crisis communication plans were quickly overwhelmed.
A hospital in Melbourne, Australia, for example, had to cancel hundreds of surgeries because of a contamination scare caused by faulty washers failing to properly clean surgical equipment. This had a flow-on effect across the hospital – and other hospitals in that city – for more than a week.
Having a crisis communication plan in place that all staff understand and can be easily adapted to different situations is essential for communicators in the hospital and healthcare sector. This includes having appropriate channels – i.e., not just relying on email – in order to keep people informed, especially when a situation can escalate quickly.
For healthcare providers in the United Kingdom, the CQC score is a challenge that is at the forefront of many minds.
Healthcare organizations are required by the government to show the public how they are performing via a rating system that’s carried out by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) so that patients can make an informed choice about their healthcare options and compare different services and providers.
The ratings are either “outstanding”, “good”, “requires improvement,” or “inadequate”.
It stands to reason that where there is dysfunction in internal communications, this will affect the quality outcomes for patients and can impact the CQC rating.
CQC inspections are fully operational, though the regulator has faced scrutiny over inspection volumes and consistency.
A government review published in 2024 found the CQC conducted just 6,700 inspections in 2023–24 — less than half the pre-pandemic level — and called for significant improvements to the assessment framework.
For UK healthcare providers, maintaining strong internal processes and communication standards is critical, as the regulator's expectations remain high even when formal inspections are less frequent.
Traditional communications such as faxes, radios, telephones, and pagers are becoming obsolete… but are still all used regularly in hospitals and healthcare organizations.
These methods of communication are often inefficient and don’t have the ability to quickly and easily reach large groups of people at once.
Making multiple calls or sending multiple faxes, for example, is time-consuming for the person disseminating the information, and this is time that can be better spent doing other things, such as patient care or responding to and solving problems (such as bed shortages or rostering issues).
Many hospitals and healthcare organizations looking to solve their internal communications challenges have adopted mass notification or alerting software systems to improve how information is shared between management and employees and between employees within the healthcare environment.
These types of systems work by sending notifications to all computers in an organization that appear directly on screen, regardless of other software being used at the time, and don’t rely on email. They can also be sent to smartphones and tablets as push notifications.
The messages can take the form of pop-up notifications and can also be sent via scrolling ticker tape across a screen. Systems such as DeskAlerts have the ability to send custom corporate screensavers with important messages, so blank screens can still be used to communicate with employees.
Sending information in this way means that it cannot be missed, skipped, or avoided.
These systems overcome barriers and obstacles posed by email overload and outdated technology and solve communication issues in healthcare, including:
Think of it as having a manager standing next to every employee, telling them about what they need to do. You can’t physically assign a manager to stand with every employee all day long, but you can have the next best thing with DeskAlerts.
You can use alerting software to inform your employees about new updates to facilities, enhanced processes, patient care issues, and inspire them to perform well.
It can be used to improve the induction processes for new staff and to drive people to the hospital’s intranet site to learn more details.
Sending quizzes can help to gauge the current understanding of systems and processes, or to determine if information campaigns have been successful in retaining knowledge.
Billboard-style screensavers on computer screens and other digital screens can be deployed throughout the hospital to communicate your values. This can help to enhance patient satisfaction, improve HCAHPS scores and enhance operational efficiencies.
The newsletters function can be used to share positive healthcare stories about innovation, stories of commitment, and successful patient outcomes to inspire staff. This encourages the adoption of best practices and helps to boost engagement and improve workplace morale.
Employees generally love having opportunities for learning and development. In organizations such as hospitals and healthcare facilities, they can be too time-poor to actively seek out and research opportunities themselves. An alerting system can help you to more effectively communicate different training opportunities for your staff that they may not otherwise know about.
With the RSVP function, you can also drive higher attendance by making it easier for people to indicate their interest in attending, and send them reminders so they don’t forget.
The system can also be used to provide ongoing training and reminders about hospital processes such as response procedures, hospital codes, updates to computer systems and compliance measures.
Important and time-critical information can be sent quickly with alerting systems. This means when you need an action to be taken immediately, people will be notified instantly. Examples include when you need to evacuate the building because of an emergency or if there’s an IT outage and you need people to use an alternative system.
This enables you to reduce the time and resources that are used in responding to multiple queries, and to focus efforts on resolution instead of answering questions.
Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Trust is part of the UK healthcare system and has 4000 employees located across two sites.
The hospitals moved from three old, outdated buildings to a new, purpose-built, state-of-the-art building and had to ensure they had an effective and robust way of communicating internally about the move and any issues. At the time, they were relying on email.
They soon realized that they needed to have a way to provide instant messages quickly and easily to help manage the safe transfer of 600 patients and 3,500 staff to the new hospital facility. With limited funds, they turned to DeskAlerts to provide a cost-effective solution.
The DeskAlerts team created a custom message template containing the organization’s logo and colors, and it was included in their package.
In the lead-up to the hospital move, DeskAlerts was deployed to every computer in the organization. Initially, it was used to send messages to employees about system outages. During the move process, it was used to notify when certain systems were being moved, as well as organization-specific issues that were caused by the move process.
Hospital staff said that it was an invaluable tool throughout the process that kept everyone informed in “real time”.
The hospitals have continued to use DeskAlerts even after their successful move process. It’s now their main communications system that is used for urgent messaging to all staff.
Lee Loads, an NHS representative said “…we find the product very easy to use and it works excellently.”
“The client that resides on the PC is small and does not cause any conflict. Upgrades to servers and clients are very easy to undertake and the DeskAlerts support team are contactable very quickly,” Lee said.
Read the case study: Ensuring the Safe Transfer of Patients and Staff to the New Hospital.
CHU Saint-Pierre is a university hospital located in the Belgian city of Brussels. The organization needed a dedicated notifications channel to keep their employees informed on a daily basis, and also wanted a system that could be used in the event of an emergency.
They implemented DeskAlerts internally as a backup solution for their primary email and telephone notification channels. They found it to be a reliable internal communications channel - but its real value really came to the fore when terrorist attacks took place in the city in March 2016, which saw the other channels overloaded and rendered inaccessible.
Having the secondary messaging channel meant that hospital management and employees were better equipped to handle the situation.
On 22 March 2016, there were three coordinated suicide bombings in the city of Brussels that left 32 civilians dead and more than 300 others injured.
Shortly after the explosions, the hospital went into a state of alert and the phone network became overloaded.
Geoffrey Collet, the CHU Saint-Pierre Application Administrator, said that DeskAlerts was used to lower the number of internal calls.
“When the external phone network went down, we used DeskAlerts to notify the employees about switching to SMS messaging,” he said.
“After the bomb alerts cured again, we used DeskALerts to notify employees about police with sniffer dogs operating in our units.
“Without DeskAlerts, this day would have been much harder to manage,” he said.
Read the case study: Reliable Hospital Emergency Communication During Terrorist Attacks.
Do you want to know more about improving communications in hospitals and trusts?
Download free infographic – "Effective internal communication in healthcare"
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