Once again, DailyNurse is publishing a series of blog posts on nursing issues in the developing world by MScN nursing students at the Karachi, Pakistan campus of the Aga Khan School of Nursing and Midwifery.
These articles were written as part of a class assignment that involved composing and submitting short research articles for publication in a recommended nursing blog or journal. The object: to help them hone their English language communication skills as future nurse leaders in Pakistan’s healthcare system. As their instructor put it, one of the goals of the exercise is to encourage nursing students to become “Change Agents” in healthcare settings and the world. DailyNurse thanks the instructor and all of the Change Agents who submitted articles. We hope you will find the selected posts informative and thought-provoking.
The word “Nurse” is a noun and a verb, which means care or to care. Care includes showing interest and concern for a patient’s issues, and providing them with supervision and protection. The most important feature that differentiates nurses from other health care professionals is the quantity of time and quality of interaction that we share with our patients.
In the context of developing states like Pakistan, the majority of nurses face the issue of short staffing and extended duty hours. However, we must make time for showing concern for patients and therapeutic communication.
Therapeutic communication is of paramount importance in nursing. Many nursing theorists have discussed the various aspects of nursing communication. Hildegard Peplau described phases of the nurse-patient relationship to make it successful. Her phases include the orientation phase, working phase, and termination phase. But the issue is that there are always workload and time limitations for nurses to complete the task. Hence, as a traditional practice nurses used to spend most of their time in the working phase so they could complete their assigned duties within the time of their shift. Painfully, in this scenario patients can feel neglected due to lack of attention from the nursing staff.
In the above scenario, it is difficult to hold anyone held responsible for the lack of therapeutic communication and caring practices for patients. Nurses often claim that due to work overload they are simply unable to communicate effectively with patients.
The way forward
- Therapeutic communication is one of the foremost important components to provide holistic care to patients. So, it must be considered a specific assignment rather than merely a simple talk between a nurse and a patient. Patients’ concerns and apprehensions must be addressed as a priority.
- Bedside nurses must be provided with equal opportunities for participation in policymaking to enhance the application of policies in the practical arena.
- Educators, supervisors, instructors, and researchers must have certain fixed clinical hours so they could discuss practical issues from their different perspectives.
- There can be specific tools to assess the quality of the interpersonal relationship between nurses and patients.
- Apart from vitals monitoring and medication, the specific role of counseling and discharge needs to be assigned to nurses to enhance patients’ level of satisfaction.
- Different strategies can be applied to eliminate the communication gap between nurses and patients for instance there must be grouped training sessions to guide patients about their disease process and self-care regimes.
- Although every patient is an individual and needs undivided attention it remains difficult for nurses, especially those in public sector hospitals. Most of the time one or two staff nurses are responsible for the whole ward. So, in such scenarios, pre-planned educational sessions can be helpful for both patients and nurses to create awareness in patients.
