At Unwin House, it is essential that our service users are able to take part in discussions about their own support needs and contribute to their own Personal Development Plans.
It is important for support workers to consider the many barriers to communication that service users may face.
Environmental Barriers
- Noise – can cause distraction or disrupt hearing
- Lighting – can make non-verbal communication harder to recognise
- Physical Space – can prevent individuals from feeling comfortable or adequately accessing the room.
Overcoming environmental barriers involves planning when designing social care services, including buildings and offices, to ensure the physical environment is suitable for the needs of both the communicator and receiver.
Lighting from windows and from room lights should be considered to reduce issues such as poor visibility, glare or distraction. Noise should be limited where possible. Similarly, the size of a room, door frames and equipment should be planned to ensure accessibility for individuals with different mobility needs.
Social and Cultural Barriers
Social and cultural barriers are caused by differences in social or cultural symbols, meaning and behaviours, and can affect verbal communications in the form of:
- Language barriers, (foreign language and use of colloquialisms/slang)
- Non-Verbal Communications – these can have great variance across societies or cultures, creating opportunities for misunderstanding or unintended offence
Overcoming this barrier involves ensuring a diverse workforce or drawing information from different communities to ensure that societies and cultures are being represented and communicated to in the most effective ways.
With language barriers, Social Care practitioners should have access to translators where possible, or literature translated into different languages, to ensure communication is being conveyed in a language the service user can understand.
Physical and Emotional Barriers
Physical and emotional barriers can also affect an individual’s access to, transmission or understanding of communications.
Support workers should take extra care to understand the needs of service users and be prepared to adapt their communication style or offer alternative communications in order to overcome these types of barriers. Physical and Emotional Barriers include:
- Sensory Issues (e.g., loss of sight or hearing)
- Learning Disability
- Physical Disability
- Emotional Status
- Behavioural Issues
- Mental Health Issues.
Physical and emotional barriers affect individual service users in different ways, and present barriers to communication in ways that can be easily missed if Support Workers do not take the proper time to understand and engage with their service users.
Both physical and emotional barriers can occur as a singular episode or a longer lasting occurrence, which may mean taking a different approach to communicating, or simply rescheduling or reiterating the information for the service user to access at a different time, for example through emailing a summary of the conversation.
Unwin House 