Featured Intern: Communication is Key

By Amanda Sauceda

My foodservice rotation is complete!  This upcoming week I will have spring break and a series of small rotations until the end of May when I will be done with my internship.  Time is flying by and I am so excited to really see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Looking back to everything I have experienced there is one concept in particular that is crucial to any area of dietetics that you go in, communication.  It doesn’t matter where you are or what position you are in if you can’t effectively communicate with someone then nothing will get accomplished.  As a dietitian we need to be able to talk to a doctor one minute then turn around and talk to a patient the next.  Talking to the doctor requires a high level of thinking using a lot of scientific terminology but talking to the patient also requires a high level of thinking it’s just presented differently.  A dietitian can’t just turn around and tell the patient that they have problem xy because that means nothing to them.  They need to understand what that means in relationship to their life and eating habits.  A dietitian also needs to be able to communicate with the other people around them like foodservice staff, pharmacists, supervisors, patient’s families, and the list goes on and on. I remember back from one of my communication classes that I took was that people do not always understand the same way you do.  I can tell someone something where I think the meaning is perfectly clear but that isn’t always the case and that’s where a miscommunication occurs.  This concept sounds so simple but in reality there are a lot of outsides “noises” that can prevent the intended message from being received properly.  Those “noises” are actually sounds but could be things like nonverbal cues or values the receiver might have so they interpret the message differently than from what was intended.  So try to keep this communication model in mind when relaying information to someone because it can be very easy to not effectively get the message across.