Communications between a nurse and a patient make a significant part of health care process. The first need of any patient is to be understood aright and clearly, to express his or her health problems, thoughts and emotions. Professional and effective nurses should behave and speak with confidence, listen carefully and react properly to every situation that can happen in human communications. Nurses should have credibility and be able to convince the patient in the necessity and regularity of treatment. Trust between the patient and the nurse makes health more effective because this way the person will feel more comfortable and secure.
Verbal Communication
Among the most determinant requirements to medical staff are communicative skills. A nurse should get out a message in a simple manner that every person who has no medical education or knowledge can understand. Medical prescriptions should be explained to the patient without special terms, briefly and unambiguously. In addition, a nurse should take into account state of health of her confidant that can affect the ability to catch on and to memorize information. There should be mutual respect between the person and the medical staff. It can help to avoid multiple conflicts between people during the treatment period. The other skills and tasks of any nurse should include:
- listening;
- timing;
- speaking and interacting with the patient;
- educating him or her;
- necessary explanations.
Medial professionals are usually very busy. They should not contribute too much time to every patient. However, they are to listen to all health complaints in a sufficient way to realize the problem and to have all symptoms of the disease reported. Nurses should ask probing questions that send the conversation in the right direction. They have to make recommendations and pieces of advice in details, to explain the reasons of the treatment, to get feedback and to make sure that the person understands prescription in the right way. As educational level of the most patients is much lower than of the nurses, hospital staff usually has to act as teachers: medical workers explain in detail processes that run in the body, course of the disease and effects that treatment should have. Complete understanding of all reactions and consequences is extremely important because it influences behavior and actions of the person that determine effectiveness of the therapy.
Styles of Communication
All people are not the same. Patients differ by age, state of health, temperament, level of education, sense of hearing and sense of vision. Nurses have to react depending on the real circumstances. They have to find the proper approach to every person and change communicative models and styles. Talking to peers, senior people, children or teens, health care workers should be flexible and attentive. If they can be open, relaxed and friendly with one kind of patients, the other ones need nurses to be dominant, animated and argumentative. In case if a patient provides too much personal or unrelated information about his or her life, family or other circumstances, the medical worker should stop this speech gently, but positively in the way that the person would not feel hurt or offended. The other patients could be reserved or feel shy and a nurse should conciliate them and encourage express all of the complaints.
Written Instructions
All prescriptions and medical recommendations should be made in the written form. There are only few patients who know names of medications and pills. In addition, people are usually not able to remember all of the doctors’ pieces of advice and could easily confuse time or quality of the drugs to take. These messages should be clear, correct and concise. They should not include any minor information in order not to overload the patient’s memory and to avoid any confusion.
Good and effective communication between a nurse and a patient is extremely important. It can influence the treatment results and have therapeutic effect. Medical workers should be positive, effective, attentive and in a good mood. And in this case the patients will be confident of the treatment they get; they will execute all prescriptions and recover sooner.
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