Communication in healthcare teams: the questions that find where it breaks down
Communication in healthcare teams breaks down in predictable spots, and a short staff feedback survey can show your department exactly where.
A shift change happens, and the incoming nurse is missing one detail that mattered. A manager relays a scheduling change secondhand, and half the unit hears about it from a coworker instead. Neither moment shows up on a patient chart, but both show up later as missed deadlines and staff who quietly stop flagging what they see.
This page is not a clinical-safety resource. SBAR, handoff protocols, and patient-safety reporting already have their own systems, and nothing here replaces them or measures patient-safety outcomes.
This is about the day-to-day communication that keeps a department running: clarity, getting information to the right person, and feeling safe enough to say something. A short staff feedback survey, built around the right questions, is how a manager finds exactly where that breaks down.
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30 communication questions, organized by where staff feel the gap
Communication breaks down in a handful of predictable spots. These 30 questions are grouped into five categories, so you can run the full set or pull a smaller rotation into a recurring team pulse check between full cycles.
Clarity
- How clear are you on what's expected of you this week? (Rating scale)
- How clear is the reasoning behind decisions that affect your unit? (Rating scale)
- Do you know who makes the call when something changes last minute? (Yes / No / Unsure)
- How often do you get conflicting instructions from different people above you? (Frequency scale)
- When priorities shift, how quickly do you find out? (Multiple choice)
- What is one decision from the last month that still doesn't make sense to you? (Open-ended)
Handoffs and information-sharing
These cover how non-clinical information, like schedules and updates, moves between people and shifts. They are not a substitute for clinical handoff protocol.
- How often does non-clinical information get lost between shifts or teams? (Frequency scale)
- When you start a shift, how confident are you that you have what you need? (Rating scale)
- How often do you find out about a change after it already affected your work? (Frequency scale)
- Is there one consistent place you check for updates, or do they arrive in several places? (Multiple choice)
- What is the most common reason information doesn't reach your team on time? (Open-ended)
- How well do outgoing and incoming staff exchange what the next person needs to know? (Rating scale)
Access to information
- Can you find the information you need without asking three different people? (Yes / No / Sometimes)
- How easy is it to get a straight answer when you have a question for leadership? (Rating scale)
- Is there information you need regularly that you currently cannot get? (Yes / No, plus open-ended)
- How often do you learn about a policy change from a colleague instead of an official source? (Frequency scale)
- Do you know where to find the current version of your unit's procedures? (Yes / No)
- What information would make your job easier if you could get to it faster? (Open-ended)
Comfort raising concerns
These work best with an anonymous option, since the goal is hearing from people who might otherwise stay quiet; see anonymous employee surveys for how to set that up.
- How comfortable are you raising a concern with your direct supervisor? (Rating scale)
- If you spotted a problem with how something was communicated, would you say something? (Yes / No / Not sure)
- Have you ever held back feedback because you weren't sure it would be welcomed? (Yes / No)
- How safe do you feel disagreeing with a decision in a team meeting? (Rating scale)
- Who on your team would you go to first with a concern, and why? (Open-ended)
- Do you believe raising a concern here leads to a response, or to nothing? (Multiple choice)
Follow-up and closed-loop practices
- When you raise something, how often do you hear back about what happened next? (Frequency scale)
- Can you think of a recent example where feedback actually changed something? (Yes / No, plus open-ended)
- How long does it typically take to hear back after you flag an issue? (Multiple choice)
- Does your team ever revisit old concerns to confirm they stayed fixed? (Yes / No / Unsure)
- How clearly does your manager communicate what changed because of past feedback? (Rating scale)
- What would make you more likely to speak up next time? (Open-ended)
Get clear on what your team needs to work better
Get a ready-made team survey template you can customize for clarity, handoffs, and feedback follow-up
Why these questions matter to your department's bottom line
These categories aren't abstract.
Korn Ferry's 2025 Workforce survey of more than 15,000 professionals found that 80% of workers would stay in a job because they have a manager they trust, a direct line from "comfort raising concerns" and "follow-up" to retention.
Trust gets built or eroded in exactly the moments these questions ask about.
| Category | What it signals | Action it drives |
| Clarity | Staff don't know what to prioritize or who owns a decision | Restate priorities more often and name a single owner per decision |
| Handoffs and information-sharing | Non-clinical updates die between shifts or teams | Standardize where updates live and who confirms they were received |
| Access to information | Staff route around official channels to get a straight answer | Centralize where current policies and schedules live |
| Comfort raising concerns | Problems go unreported until they are bigger and more expensive | Build psychological safety and offer an anonymous channel for what a conversation can't reach |
| Follow-up and closed-loop practices | Feedback goes in and nothing visibly comes back out | Close the loop out loud, even when the answer is no action right now |
The stakes are rising, not falling. Gallup's live global data shows engagement fell to about 20% in 2025, down from 23% in 2022, the lowest level since the pandemic.
This stays narrower than the broader picture in healthcare employee engagement surveys, which measures engagement overall; this page is about communication specifically.
How to sequence these questions so people actually finish them
Length matters. SurveyMonkey data shows a single-question survey gets about a 94% completion rate, dropping to roughly 79% at 40 questions, so sending all 30 at once will cost you responses. Pick 8 to 12 per send and rotate categories across the quarter instead.
Order matters too. Put clarity and handoffs first, since they're factual and easy to answer, and save comfort-raising-concerns and follow-up for later, once some rapport is established.
Keep those two sections anonymous and add skip logic so a "no" answer skips the irrelevant follow-up, which lifts completion (96% versus 89%) and cuts "fair or poor" ratings; Build with AI can build that branching from a plain-language description instead of question by question.
Frequently asked questions
- How many of these 30 questions should I send at once?
- Should this survey be anonymous?
- What rating scale works best?
- How often should I run this?
Turn this question bank into a survey your team can send this week
None of these questions need to stay in a document.
Drop the categories that matter most for your unit into a survey, send it to one shift or the whole department, and treat the first round of answers as a baseline rather than a verdict.
SurveyMonkey's employee survey guide covers distribution, timing, and anonymity, and the team survey template linked above is a fast way to get a first version out the door this week.
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