Please read this short case study and answer the 3 questions below it.
CASE STUDY: It is extraordinarily difficult to manage communications in health care settings. Few cases offer a better illustration of that difficulty than Jessica Santillon’s. She was a 17- year old girl who died in 2003 after undergoing a heart and lung transplant in which, at one of the nation’s top medical centers, she received organs with the wrong blood type. Her tragic story shows how social, technical, and organizational complexity combines to create daunting communication barriers for health providers and administrators. Consider the complicating factors in this situation, and the related leadership questions they raise: The Family. Jessica’s parents smuggled her into the country from Mexico, hoping to find a cure for a heart and lung disorder that doctors in her home country could not treat. The family settled in North Carolina, settling down in a trailer. They soon came to the attention of a local builder, who started a charity that eventually raised enough money for her to receive a transplant at Duke Medical Center. The procedure went terribly wrong, leading to severe and irreversible brain damage. When the doctors informed Jessica’s mother they planned to stop treatment, she announced at a press conference, through a translator, “They are taking her off of the medicine little by little in order to kill her. They want to rid themselves of this problem.”
Answer the following questions using the case study above.
1. What social and cultural barriers may have made it difficult for the doctors to communicate with Jessica’s family? What might have the doctors done to increase the chances that Jessica’s family understood the true nature of the problems in this terrible circumstance?
2. How would you organize the complex set of steps required in this transplant process to ensure that misunderstandings do not occur in hand-offs between professionals?
3. If you were the Duke Medical Center CEO, what general communication strategy would you put in place to manage the stakeholders in this case? In particular, how would your messages to each group differ from the others?