Communication Cycle Health and Social Care

The communication cycle

Effective communication involves a two-way process in which each person tries to understand the viewpoint of the other person. " According to Argyle, skilled interpersonal interaction (social skills) involves a cycle in which you have to translate or 'decode' what other people are communicating and constantly adapt your own. Communication is a cycle because when two people communicate they need to check that their ideas have been understood".

An example of good communication involves the process of checking understanding, using reflective or active listening. Argyle's stages of the communication cycle were an idea occurs, message coded, message sent, message received, message decoded, message understood. Verbal and non-verbal communication is not always straightforward. The communication cycle involves a kind of code that has to be translated. There are 5 stages in the "communication cycle" which are:

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• Idea occurs: this is the stage when an individual thinks what he is going to say and who to.
• Message coded: this is the way that an individual puts his thoughts together with the way he is going to communicate, putting the thoughts into language or into some other code such as sign language.
• Message sent: this is stage is when an individual speaks or sign what they are going to say, in few words is the way the message is sent.
• Message received: this is where the person you are speaking to has listened to what you said and they have to sense the message by hearing or watching.
• Message decoded: The receiver has to understand the message that the sender has just sent. This could be misunderstood easily by interpreting words differently or they might make assumptions about your body language as well as words.
• Message understood: at this stage the message should be understood but it does not always happen at the first time, and if so the cycle needs to start all over again. Without just any one of these stages the cycle would not work. An example of a difficult situation is when your service user tells you they are in pain, but can’t describe the pain they are in.

This is difficult because you need to understand what the pain is and what the source of the pain is so that you can resolve the pain and provide a diagnosis, so if they can’t describe the pain you are unable to do so. You can be asking simple questions which may help you understand what sort of pain they are suffering, also by feeling where they claim the problem is and you can see from their reaction if it is painful, but not inflicting too much pain upon them. Using the communication cycle effectively will help. M1 How communication cycle may be used to communicate sensitive issues. Ideas occur: the nurse will start thinking on how communicate to the wife and that she is going to be the one to tell her. She will ask herself what could be the best way to communicate and when and where she needs to communicate about the husband’s condition. This promotes effective communication. * Message coded: the nurse has thought about the ideas and has organized her thoughts; she knows exactly what she is going to say. She has to think about the voice tonality she should use in order to prevent the wife thinking the nurse is not bothered about the loss.

Body language plays an important role and could show that the nurse cares about the situation. The nurse will start thinking about the language she is going to use and ask herself what the wife already knows about it e. g. the husband is ill. The nurse will take the wife through to a private room where it's only them two; by doing this the wife should know that the nurse is going to tell her something terrible, the seating would be a barrier if the seats are too far away from each other; the nurse should sit close to the wife. * Message sent: the nurse has now told the wife about her husband.

She has used the communication cycle to encode the information correctly and therefore, said something like "I'm afraid that your husband passed away last night in his sleep, we did everything we could to save him, we're sorry," rather than something like "Your husband died last night,". The first of which is a correct way of putting it, and the second way is a much more insensitive way of saying it. Message received: now the wife has to sense the message the nurse has just sent her by hearing the words or looking at the body language. Message decoded: the wife now needs to decode the message or to interpret it. She has to observe the body language and the way the message is expressed by the nurse. Message understood: at this stage the patient should have understood the message by the nurse should but this does not always happen at the first time and this can be identified from the wife’s reaction and behavior. If this does not happen the cycle needs to start all over again.

Tuckman’s cycle

In 1965, Bruce Tuckman, an educational psychologist, suggested that most groups go through four stages in group interactionas and described them as Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. He did this after he had observed many small groups in various environments and concluded that all groups went through certain "stages" before they became optimally effective.

Forming

The first stage is forming; this is an important stage because the forming of the team takes place.

This stage is also called “ice-breaking” because it is a stage where all the team members get to know each other and become friendly, they are unsure about who everybody is and what their roles are. The individual’s behavior is driven by a desire to be accepted by the others, and avoid controversy or conflict. The psychologist, doctor and surgeon should meet and discuss about the situation, sharing informations concerns and questions.

Storming

The second stage is storming; at this stage the individual start to show their real feelings and their personalities too. This is because they start to relax and be comfortable around others in their group. Also others in the group may start to have conflict were they have different opinions about ideas, and they don't agree on others, relationships between members will be made or broken and some may never recover. In extreme cases the team can become stuck in the Storming phase. The professionals starts questioning themselves what their role and duties in the group are or what they are responsible for. Each professional hould say what their solution is and how long it will take, followed by the risk that will come with it. This is a stage where patience is fundamental as there will be disagreements and they will avoid listening to each other; this is the reason why it will take time.

Norming

As the team moves out from the storming phase they enter the third stage which is norming; this is when the group starts working as a team after having had their arguments and they start to trust themselves as they accept the vital contribution of each member of the team.

The team members know each other better, they may be socializing together, and they are able to ask each other for help. At this stage they all should bring the ideas together and reach a conclusion on what they are going to do. They start working as a team and must agree with the decisions made, and if they do not agree they should at least follow the team to avoid the time being wasted. They need to take in consideration how dangerous the procedure will be.

Performing

This is the last stage. Many groups never reach the performing stage. Everyone knows each other well enough to be able to work together, and trusts each other enough to allow independent activity. There is a high level of accepting others, listening to others, and helping others. Performance is delivered through people working effectively together. The team has come to a conclusion and their plan will be applied soon.

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