Health and Social Care Unit 1

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Health and Social Care P1Explain the role of effective communication and interpersonal interaction in a health and social care context. What Is Effective Interpersonal Communication? Communication is a complex activity involving words, body language, voice tone and volume, the topic under discussion, the prejudgments that people bring to the topic, and the “communication history” between participants in the discussion. Communication is effective when the recipient of a message understands its meaning and can express that meaning back to the speaker or sender message.Taken from http://www.flexstudy.com/catalog/schpdf.cfm?coursenum=97003 Communication is a central part of everyday life for most people and it is particularly important when working with vulnerable people and their families in a health & social care environment. It is about making contact with others and being understood. Communicating with others helps us to make and develop new relationships, give and receive information, helps us to express needs and feelings, share thoughts and ideas and affirming one another. This does not always occur, as the recipient may have hearing difficulties or may not speak the same language as the sender of the message. For example if an English woman is trying to ask a Chinese service user, how much fruit she would like, but the Chinese woman does not understand as the carer is speaking in English and the Chinese woman can only speak Chinese. We normally check for that understanding with words like these: “do you know what I mean?” It is not enough just to hear the words. The listener must understand the meaning well enough to respond to and act upon it. Ineffective communication occurs when the meaning is not understood. This is usually discovered later when the people involved yell simultaneously, “That’s not what we agreed!” Communication is
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