Making the Case: Why explore and adopt uses of mediation and mediation skills in health care?
© Jeanne F. Franklin and Jane Reister Conard
- Hospital and healthcare conflicts often have strong multi-cultural components; personal values play a large role
- healthcare conflict can ignite quickly; not much “white space”
- Strong need for many medical relationships to continue
-Internal relations
-External relations – consumers, payors, reputation
- Rapid change peculiar to healthcare environment – creates stress and instability – shrinks “white space”
- facilitation, consensus building, authentic team building, communication skills building are preventive practices that can shore up morale, avert blow-ups, create learning environment in which change can be absorbed
- Managing costs and redirecting resources toward positive uses of time
- It’s happening now so become literate and seize the opportunity to work this into management
- Wrap up points as to “why?”
- A lot of today’s conflicts are a consequence of communication failures. People are doing more things at the same time, with less support, but with more oversight and criticism. Mediation skills facilitate communication, get you back to “core stuff,” and can have positive spill-over effects.
