Sending and Receiving Safety and Risk Messages in Hospitals: An Exploration into Organizational Communication Channels and Providers’ Communication Overload

ABSTRACT

This study explores hospital workers’ experiences with workplace communication overload and its implications for effective safety and risk messaging in hospital organizations. We use a multi-step thematic analysis of interview (N = 12) and focus group (N = 8, 28 participants) data collected from hospital workers to analyze how they describe specific organizational communication channels influencing their communication overload. We specifically examine how workers’ socially constructed channel affordances and constraints for sending/receiving safety information provide meaning to their communicatively overloaded states. Hospital workers explained that asynchronous channels such as e-mail and voicemail aggravated communication overload, while synchronous channels such as team huddles alleviated it. We discuss the implications of these results for the communication overload model by pointing to violations of communication channel preference and literature on the social affordances of communication channels. Study limitations and future directions are offered.