This new joint paper by our Professor Bernadette Watson, published in the BMC Nursing journal under BMC, part of Springer Nature, discusses what enables or hinders health professionals to speak up about a safety concern. It utilises Communication Accommodation Theory to explore the impact the communication behaviour and speaker characteristics has on the receiver of a speaking up message.
Speaking up research to date has overwhelmingly been atheoretical and focused on the person speaking up. Clinicians (N=208) from varying disciplines responded to two hypotheticals speaking up vignettes, where participants reading the vignettes were the receivers of speaking up messages.
The research team explored potential differences between different receiver groups (profession and seniority). The findings demonstrate that speaking up interactions are intergroup in nature (seniority and profession). Receivers of a message are also influenced by the speaker’s accommodative stance and the presence of others during the speaking up event. These influences affected receivers differently, depending on their clinical discipline.
The research team's findings suggest that speaking up training needs to stop being predominately based on technical skill (learning a mnemonic) and to start theorising how receivers want to be spoken to. Speaking up programs need to be interprofessional to help clinicians understand and appreciate the impact of the intergroup dynamics within these conversations, and how to manage them within an interaction.
More information about the article can be found on the website HERE.
