Читать книгу The Nursing Associate's Handbook of Clinical Skills - Группа авторов - Страница 151

Person‐centred care and fundamental care are two interconnected areas in which nursing policy and healthcare reform are focusing on. Both initiatives highlight a positive nurse–patient relationship. For these initiatives to work, nurses need guidance with regards to how they can best develop and maintain relationships with patients. This study explains a novel methodological approach, known as holistic interpretive synthesis, for interpreting empirical research findings to create practice‐relevant recommendations for nurses. The recommendations for the nurse–patient relationship created through this approach can be used by nurses to establish, maintain and evaluate therapeutic relationships with patients as they strive to deliver person‐centred fundamental care.

Source: Feo et al. (2017)

A study by Bundgaard et al. (2012) illustrates through an investigation of what knowing the patient meant in an endoscopy clinic. These authors identified two themes: what to know and how to get to know. Nurse’s information focused on practical issues related to the endoscopic procedure. Categories of necessary knowledge included anxiety, medication and previous experience. Nurses were reported to have uncovered the necessary information to ‘get to know’ their patient by using their senses and communication skills. These reflect the characteristics of emotional intelligence as stipulated by Mayer & Salovey (1997) (see Table 6.1), whereby skills and abilities such as self and emotional awareness, emotional self‐control, empathy, comprehensive interpretation of language, active listening, tuning into and picking up on patient cues, verbal and non‐verbal behaviours, intuition, clinical reasoning, clinical judgements, problem‐solving and reflection all play an important role in getting to know the patient.

When greeting a patient or in any nurse–patient encounter, the nursing associates’ goal is to set aside distractions and to give the patient their undivided attention. This requires the nursing associates to demonstrate the ability to be physically and mentally present in every interaction and the ability to prioritise relationship building. This focused attention may also help the nursing associate to shield the patient from the commotion and activity of the setting. Moreover, it may assist the nursing associate in what to anticipate and even in detecting small changes in the patient’s condition (Kitson et al. 2013; Feo et al. 2017).