How communication can save lives

In Australia approximately 10 per cent of hospital patients will suffer an avoidable critical incident, and almost all of these are related to errors in communication.

Critical incidents are accidents that cause harm to patients that could otherwise be avoided.

To discuss how linguistics can meet health research to fight this communication breakdown, Ninah Kopel spoke with Diana Slade.

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Diana Slade is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at UTS and Director of the International Research Centre for Communication in Healthcare.

Image: Army Medicine on Flickr