Challenges of masked communication in healthcare and facilitating strategies

Wearing a face mask is one of the main means of preventing the transmission of certain respiratory diseases. This measure, combined with social distancing and hand washing, helps to slow the spread and reduce transmission of the virus, especially among people who are expressed as asymptomatic carriers, while causing communication difficulties between patients and healthcare professionals. If strategies to cope with these difficulties are not developed, serious errors may occur in the field of health services. Because the field of health services is one of the service areas where it is vital to maintain communication without interruption. For this reason, the effective performance of the procedures requires that the health personnel understand the messages correctly and appropriately both in their communication with each other and with the patient and that the patients can adequately express their feelings and thoughts to the healthcare professionals. The aim of this study is to reveal the difficulties and facilitating strategies of masked communication in health services during the COVID-19 process. The method of “document scanning-a literature review” was used as a way of data collection in the research. In this direction, the literature dealing with the importance of the face in expressing emotions in face-to-face communication and the difficulties caused by face masks in communication during the COVID-19 epidemic was scanned using keywords and various combinations of these words.