Training healthcare teams in intercultural communication and patient safety

This MOOC examines three key areas of learning:

a) intercultural communication

b) multicultural/multidisciplinary teams

c) patient safety

More specifically this MOOC will address the following:

• What is intercultural communication?
• What are the characteristics of effective intercultural communication and how can we achieve them?
• What do we mean by Multicultural/Multidisciplinary Healthcare Teams (MMHT)?
• Why is effective intercultural communication essential to MMHT?
• What challenges do MMHTs face in learning to communicate through the cultural boundaries of each other’s cultures?
• What is patient safety?
• Why do we need to be concerned about it?
• Why effective intercultural communication within MMHT is the key to patient safety?

If you are a health professional I hope that this short course will help you to reflect deeply on your practice and that of your colleagues; if you are or have been a patient, I believe that as a human being you will also benefit by reading and discussing some of the content in this course with others who are following it.