Communication and relational practice: Nursing

Communication is the exchange of information, thoughts, and feelings between individuals, groups, or organizations. Nurses use effective communication to create a therapeutic patient-nurse relationship that supports a high level of patient care, encourages interprofessional collaboration, and promotes quality health outcomes.As a nurse, you can promote effective communication by using concepts of relational practice.

This can involve skills like reaching out to your patients and listening to them to better understand their needs; being authentic in your communication by demonstrating respect for yourself and others; and creating a sense of mutuality by partnering with your patient to accomplish shared goals.Now, when your patient needs assistance with communication, you can use the five steps of the nursing process, assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation, and evaluation, to guide your communication while providing care.Starting with assessment, you’ll gather data to determine all the contextual factors that can influence communication so you can understand your patient’s unique communication needs.

During this step, you’ll assess the context in which the communication will occur between you and your patient. You can start by assessing physical and emotional factors, like visual or hearing impairments, as well as conditions like stroke, that can cause aphasia.

Also be sure to look for emotional factors like anxiety, which can affect your patient’s ability to concentrate on what’s being said; or psychotic states which can cause distraction due to hallucinations.Also be sure to include developmental factors in your assessment so you can adapt your communication techniques to meet your patient’s unique age-related needs, like infants and young children.Next, you'll establish a nursing diagnosis for your patient who needs assistance with communication, such as impaired verbal communication.

You’ll also identify additional diagnoses that can result from impaired communication, like ineffective coping, social isolation, or low self-esteem.During the planning step, you’ll establish outcomes, like my patient will be able to effectively communicate their needs.Then, during the implementation step, you’ll carry out actions to promote communication with your patient by using communication techniques that are appropriate for the patient’s specific needs.

For instance, if your patient is intubated, you can use communication aids such as a picture board or paper and writing utensils to help them communicate their needs; for patients with aphasia, you can collaborate with a speech therapist; for young children, you can use dolls, stuffed animals, or games to facilitate communication; and when patients speak a different language than you, you can provide an interpreter.For all patients, you’ll use therapeutic communication techniques[, like active listening, where you attend closely to both verbal and nonverbal communication, and express empathy, by saying “It must be frustrating to know what you want to say but not be able to say it.”Finally, evaluation is where you’ll determine if the plan of care was successful by considering whether your interventions helped your patient effectively communicate their needs.

During this step, you’ll identify what worked and what didn’t, as well as factors that may have affected the outcomes, and then revise previous steps of the nursing process as needed.Alright, as a quick recap...

Communication is the exchange of information, thoughts, and feelings between individuals, groups, or organizations. You can promote effective communication by using concepts of relational practice and the nursing process to care for patients who need assistance with communication.