Challenges of masked communication in healthcare and facilitating strategies

Challenges of masked communication in healthcare and facilitating strategiesS uccessful communication is a fundamental component of healthcare, and ensuring that the healthcare professional understands messages accurately and appropriately, as well as patients being able to adequately express their concerns to health-care professionals, is essential to performing procedures effectively. [1]In this context, health-care providers use verbal communication to convey basic information about medical care, planning of activities, instructions, and procedures to patients with words of support and encouragement in uncertain or difficult times.In this context, health-care providers use verbal communication to convey basic information about planning medical care activities, instructions, and procedures to patients with words of support and en-couragement during uncertain or difficult times.On the other hand, effective communication in healthcare is also a central requirement for establishing therapeutic relationships, and functional professional relationships are a prerequisite for the provision of high-quality care. [2]However, face masks used in healthcare may reduce the quality of communication by attenuating the verbal communication signals produced by the verbal communicator, while also hindering communication non-verbally, for example, by eliminating the majority of facial expressions. [3]Preventing facial expression may lead to insufficient understanding of the information or support words provided in the field of healthcare, leading to disappointment and anxiety, which may lead to a decrease in the patient's Wearing a face mask is one of the main means of preventing the transmission of certain respiratory diseases.This measure, combined with social distancing and hand washing, helps to slow the spread and reduce transmission of the virus, especially among people who are expressed as asymptomatic carriers, while causing communication difficulties between patients and healthcare professionals.If strategies to cope with these difficulties are not developed, serious errors may occur in the field of health services.Because the field of health services is one of the service areas where it is vital to maintain communication without interruption.For this reason, the effective performance of the procedures requires that the health personnel understand the messages correctly and appropriately both in their communication with each other and with the patient and that the patients can adequately express their feelings and thoughts to the healthcare professionals.The aim of this study is to reveal the difficulties and facilitating strategies of masked communication in health services during the COVID-19 process.The method of "document scanning-a literature review" was used as a way of data collection in the research.In this direction, the literature dealing with the importance of the face in expressing emotions in face-to-face communication and the difficulties caused by face masks in communication during the COVID-19 epidemic was scanned using keywords and various combinations of these words.