It is very difficult to manage communications in health care settings.

It is very difficult to manage communications in health care settings. Few cases offer a better illustration of that difficulty than Jesica 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 – Jesica’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 SC, 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 to Medical Center. The procedure went terribly wrong, leading to severe and irreversible brain damage. When the doctors informed Jesica’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’. “

Need Help Writing an Essay?

Tell us about your assignment and we will find the best writer for your project

Get Help Now!

The Procedure – A heart and lung transplant is obviously a challenging procedure. Though Dr. James Jaggers, the chief of pediatric surgery at Duke University, was a highly skilled and well-regarded physician, he was just one among many professionals involved in a multi-step process that began with the location of suitable organs somewhere in North America and continued through transferring the patient to the intensive care unit (ICU). The many handoffs required in this process meant there was a risk of important information being lost or garbled at key transition points, as in the “whisper down the lane” game. This is in fact what happened. Jesica Santillon’s blood type was O, while the ograns’ was A. Carolina Donor Services located the organs and, they claimed, informed Dr. Jaggers of the organs’ blood type. Dr. Jaggers does not remember the conversation about it. Another physician was sent to pick up the organs in Boston. He was informed three times of the blood type, but since he did not know Jesica’s blood type, he was not aware of the mismatch.

Questions:

1. What social and cultural barriers may have made it difficult for the doctors to communicate with Jesica’s family? What might have the doctors done to increase the chances that her family understood the true nature of the problems in this terrible circumstance?

2. In this case, who were the stakeholders? If you were the Duke Medical Center CEO, what general communication strategy would you put in place to manage the stakeholders? How would your messages to each group differ from the others?