Opening the Lines of Communication
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, is the bestseller by Atul Gawande. His book focuses on how the use of checklists often make the difference between success and disaster, particularly in fields such as medicine and aviation. Checklists are designed as a series of tasks to get something done right. Two communication scholars, however, take a different approach to the checklist.
The Communicative Power of The Checklist
 Medical mistakes are the eighth leading cause of death, higher than breast cancer, car accidents, and HIV/AIDS combined. Although hospitals cannot completely eliminate medical mistakes, they can develop communication strategies to prevent some mistakes. Atul Gawande offers a simple communication strategy in his latest book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. His recommendation: the checklist. The checklist is designed to increase and improve communication between physicians, nurses, and patients to prevent errors. The simple act of having a checklist to encourage communication has already had a major impact in medical practice; Gawande reported that deaths and surgical complications dropped 36% when using a checklist.
For several years, communication has been lauded as one of the primary solutions to prevent medical mistakes. But the communicative power of the checklist isn’t just for the health industry. Read more>
Check Yourself: Improving Health Care and Performance
Notice popular press coverage of Dr. Atul Gawande’s new book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. Check. Devour his easily digestible account of a simple way to dramatically improve the effectiveness of health care and various other occupational activities. Check. Consider the critical role of, and implications for, communication in Gawande’s perspective on work life. Check. Devise a pithy method for introducing the checklist principle to Communication Currents readers. Check? In the penultimate chapter of The Checklist Manifesto, medical writer Atul Gawande portrays the discomfort of Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III with accepting credit for piloting US Airways Flight 1549 to a safe crash landing in Manhattan’s Hudson River in January 2009. Sullenberger maintains that his actions in saving 155 passengers, whose lives were threatened by his Airbus A320’s encounter with Canadian geese, were merely part of a professional team’s discipline and adherence to established protocols. Read more>
Cross Current
Communicating About Health Care Reform
The health care debate has been discussed in many ways: public vs. private, big government vs. small government, freedom vs. tyranny, socialism vs. liberty, and change vs. choice. Effectively communicating about health care reform is essential as it is a predominant issue on both the presidential and congressional agendas. Unfortunately, 48% of the American public still reports being confused about health care reform. Too much time has been spent manipulating words to convince the public that specific policies are superior. Instead, policymakers should focus on clearly communicating main tenets of the plans and allowing citizens to decide for themselves.
 Information about “rhetoric on health insurance reform” leads the White House webpage. President Barack Obama has acknowledged the importance of communicating about health care reform and has presented addresses on the issue to both Congress and the public. The Department of Health & Human Services has devoted a website to health care reform that provides links to specific pages on communicating about the issue. Read more>
Communicators Speak
Communication scholars provide expertise across a wide range of topics. These audio interviews are short, informative, and represent the ongoing research in the field of communication.
 Martin Remland, West Chester University, discusses cultural differences in nonverbal communication, particularly in the use of touch. His research looks at rules about appropriate casual touches which occur in conversation, and revisits Edward Hall’s ideas on contact and noncontact cultures. Listen to the audio interview.
 Sheila McAllister-Spooner, a professor at Monmouth University, studies what high school students and parents look for in college and university websites. Interestingly, students and parents want to see the same kind of information, including information on academic majors and online applications, housing, food service, and virtual tours. Listen to the audio interview.
 Anne Stone, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, discusses how social support is communicated during transplant surgery. Stone and her colleagues asked patients what sources of information they use, and how their medical providers could assist them. One unique approach is having a family member or friend accompany the patient to medical appointments so there is a second pair of ears helping to interpret the advice and direction given by physicians. Listen to the audio interview.
 In this interview, University of Colorado, Boulder professor Sarah Jane Blithe talks about her research on how virtual workers gossip. Blithe found that virtual workers gossip differently than those who work in face-to-face environments. Online workers use initiation and privacy clauses, such as suggesting a chat, exchanging personal e-mail addresses, or requesting that conversations stay private, to gather information, build relationships, or vent. Listen to the audio interview.
 Stephen King, from Delta State University, discusses his research on heritage tourism and Southern identity, particularly in Mississippi, where official cultures, such as tourism bureaus, are sending conflicting images of the delta blues traditions with those of the stereotypical poverty tourists expect. Myths of the blues culture are created to lure tourism revenue. Listen to the audio interview.
 Michigan State University’s Kami Silk and her colleagues’ research focuses on messages to adolescent girls and women aimed at reducing their risks of the onset of breast cancer. The research looks at the way scientific data on environmental and lifestyle risk is translated for the general public, and on how young girls and women access breast cancer messages. Listen to the audio interview.
 Kami Kosenko’s research focuses on communication of HIV/AIDS prevention information to stigmatized groups. Her recent work looks at HIV/AIDS prevention within the transgendered community, where she finds that this group faces additional challenges beyond those of same sex or heterosexual partners. Disclosure of their transgendered lifestyle can potentially lead to violence and noncompliance with safe sex practices. Listen to the audio interview.
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Communicating about Alzheimer’s Disease
 Roughly 5.3 million United States citizens live with Alzheimer’s disease, and diagnoses of the illness are expected to double in the next 20 years. As Alzheimer’s statistics grow at alarming rates, family members and other caregivers often struggle to effectively communicate with and about Alzheimer’s patients. Many of the metaphors used to describe the illness, its patients, and communication between patients and caregivers dehumanize people living with what is now the most common form of dementia. Effective Alzheimer’s disease communication may significantly improve the quality of life for both Alzheimer’s patients and the men and women who provide them with care.
Dr. Ragan Fox, a Communication professor at California State University, Long Beach, investigated how metaphors may inhibit and promote communication about Alzheimer’s disease. Some metaphors that dominate conversations about Alzheimer’s disease misrepresent Alzheimer’s patients and how the disease functions. When discussing Alzheimer’s, many people compare the sickness to a dense fog and circuit breakers that turn off brain activity, and its sufferers as missing people and living ghosts.
These one-size-fits-all metaphors focus on death and destruction, and fail to accurately describe and represent many emergent forms of Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s characterizes any combination of a long list of symptoms. One patient, for example, might hallucinate but remain communicatively active and relatively cheerful, while another may be catatonic and uncommunicative. Read more>
Deployments and Military Family Communication
 Military families in the U.S. are experiencing frequent wartime deployments and other military-related separations that put a strain on their communication and relationships. These separations are stressful not only for military service members that deploy, but for the family members they leave behind, in particular military wives. The communication between military spouses before, during, and after deployment is affected in unique ways. We conducted in-depth interviews with 50 Army wives in order to better understand how deployments impact their interactions.
The wives we talked to said that the time leading up to a deployment is an uncertain and somewhat powerless time. Wives often do not know when and where their husbands will deploy, and they have many questions about how the deployment will affect them personally, their spouses, and their families. Although they feel some relief after hearing where their husbands will deploy, the departure date often fluctuates, leaving family members feeling a bit like they are on a roller coaster. Wives are also scared about the future of their marriages (e.g., “How will we maintain our marriage?”) before their husbands deploy. Read more>
Perceptions of Asian American Students: Stereotypes and Effects
Stereotypes are preconceived overgeneralizations about a group, without regard to individual uniqueness. Racial-ethnic stereotypes, include characterizations of communication and social skills, are often constructed and perpetuated by the media. For example, Asian Americans are traditionally underrepresented in the media and misrepresented with stereotypes, such as the model minority stereotype, the poor communicator or nerd stereotype, and the foreigner stereotype. Cultivation theory suggests that media-activated racial-ethnic stereotypes affect people’s perceptions about the stereotyped groups. It is important to investigate if college students’ perceptions of Asian Americans are consistent with the media stereotypes because these stereotypes could affect their interactions with Asian American peers. Read more>
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