The Power of Communication

The goal of intensive care is to maintain life and ideally restore a person’s health through complex management of multiple bodily systems. An unintended consequence of these interventions is a loss of awareness and control of their unfamiliar environment. Our ability to speak enables us to manipulate, modify and control our environment, to allay fears and anxieties, and help the process of adaptation. With an increase in survivorship through medical and technological advancements, many patients report distorted memories and traumatic experiences often compounded by the lack of communication with the people around them. The COVID-19 pandemic brought additional barriers with restrictions to visiting, the use of PPE and concerns of viral spread causing restrictions to tracheostomy manipulations to allow speech. Facilitating communication is an important role for all healthcare staff, and the skill and expertise of speech and language therapists (SLT) can help to maximise opportunities for effective communication through either verbal or non-verbal means. In turn, this improves the quality of the experience of intensive care and aids access to psychological and emotional support alongside physical rehabilitation. This chapter shares the importance of communication, the impact of communication impairment on the patient and those around them and provides a range of methods to support communication.