Therapeutic Communication In Health Care

Improved Essays
Communication in the Health Care Setting
Jeszenia McGuire
Elms College School of Nursing

Communication is an integral part of the health care delivery system; nurses of all experience levels, especially novice nurses, need to commit to developing communication skills as they are fundamental components to utilize throughout the nursing process. In my opinion, the nurse’s job is to empower his or her patient, and be their advocate; in order to accomplish this they need to have well established communication skills, especially relating to education and collaboration. In order to educate, from admission to discharge, nurses need to ensure that their patients understand their care plans, and remain autonomous throughout the process.
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In terms of therapeutic communication, QSEN identifies that in order to master the “knowledge” component of communication, a future nurse must recognize that in order to be successful, he or she needs to be clear, and have the ability to explain using various methods and proper health care terminology. For example, if a nurse was communicating with a patient’s daughter, and was trying to inform her about her father’s condition following a myocardial infarction, he or she would avoid using medical jargon, and instead opt for laymen’s terms. The nurse could describe the event as heart attack, and could draw a diagram of a functionally normal heart, and then a diagram where a portion of the heart was depleted of …show more content…
In order to deliver the best possible care a nurse

must be well versed in each of the ten competencies: patient-centered care, professionalism, leadership, systems-based practice, informatics and technology, communication, teamwork and collaboration, safety, quality improvement, and evidence-based practice.
Communication is arguably the most important competency, because it is all encompassing of the nine other competencies. For example, if a nurse is new to an institution, and is struggling with the institutions method of documenting on a computer program, he or she should would need to able to feel comfortable asking a colleague for help, to minimize the risk for an error in documentation that could potentially be harmful to the patient.
Every profession throughout society has a certain skill set needed, whether written or not, but having competencies for nursing is extremely important because of the demands of the profession; a small mistake, such as a miscalculated does can be a matter of life and death. The competencies are central to nursing because they are generalized enough to be applied in any

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