On “using a team-centered approach to evaluate effectiveness of nurse–physician communications”: in response.

To characterize communication strategies of labor and delivery nurses and their physician colleagues during perinatal decisions.A quantitative descriptive design was used.A perinatal setting in an urban acute care facility.Twenty-nine perinatal nurses and 11 attending physicians.A model of team communication derived from research on cockpit crew communication served as a framework for this analysis. Data were taken from transcriptions of audio-taped conversations and discourse analysis.Findings indicated that nurses and physicians tended to use status-based communication styles and rarely employed team-centered communication strategies.Nurse and physician status-based communication styles may hinder optimal patient outcomes.