Essay Sample on Challenges Faced in Nurse-Patient Therapeutic Relationship

Introduction

According to (Feo, Rasmussen, Wiechula, Conroy, & Kitson, 2017), in healthcare, the nursing profession is lacking the skills in establishing therapeutic relationships and lack of compassionate care. The therapeutic relationship in nursing is defined as the empathetic connection between nurse and patient in a professional interpersonal manner based on mutual trust and respect to attaining patient needs and goals (Arnold & Boggs, 2016). In a therapeutic relationship, the client requires care and has a health-related goal to achieve maximum health and well-being with the help of a nurse (Arnold & Boggs, 2016). The relationship between nurse and patient is built on trust, respect, care, empowerment, empathy, confidentiality, and veracity (Arnold & Boggs, 2016). Hence, it is crucial for the nurse to consider building a therapeutic relationship in their practice to create positive health outcomes and patient satisfaction.

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Developing a therapeutic relationship can be challenging, especially when nurses lack experience, knowledge, strategies, and lack of interpersonal skills to overcome those challenges (Feo et al., 2017). Nurses are required to develop interpersonal skills to form a rapport with clients. According to Arnold and Boggs (2016), "Implementing actions that convey feelings of respect, caring, warmth, acceptance, and understanding to the client is an interpersonal skill that requires practice (p. 202)". Various challenges arise in the therapeutic relationship at different stages and situations which make it difficult for nurses to deliver effective care, finding solutions to overcome those challenges are inevitable to maintain the therapeutic relationship as well as to meet client needs.

Unfortunately, in so many ways patience stigmatization, language barrier, and patients with disabilities tend to affect the therapeutic relationship between the nurse and the patient care. For instance, it a patient's behaviour and beliefs which are related but tend to be unknown, there might be existing errors that could be made concerning the interpretation of how the patient acts and also reports the significant symptoms. Communication within the nursing profession can be a very complicating procedure whereby the possibilities of receiving and reporting information frequently exist. For most patients, the caregiver becomes the primary contact within the medical world, and once the existing challenges are not adequately addressed the stay of the patient within the health care unit would be uncomfortable.

Language Barrier

The language barrier is one of the significant challenges that nurses tend to face while maintaining a therapeutic relationship with the patients. Poor communication tends to be dangerous since it can lead to errors of misdiagnosis, and also the patient might not get medical attention required. Effective communication tends to be the primary component towards providing health care services that are of high standards henceforth leading to the patient's satisfaction concerning their health. Besides, effective communication tends to improve the therapeutic relationship between the nurse and the patient whereby it has a profound effect on the perception of the patient towards the quality of the health care that is provided and the expected treatment outcomes (Timmins, 2002).

When the language barrier is eliminated nurses tend to increase the patient's compliance, satisfaction, acceptance and also cooperation with the medical team that is placed on the hand and tends to improve the patient's functional and psychological status. The therapeutic quality health care that exists is strongly affected by the relationship that exists between the nurse and the patient. Lack of effective communication and understanding skills tends to hurt the services that are provided to particular patients, and the results will reflect a negative improvement towards the progress of making the patient recover. The policymakers and nurses should make an effort to ensure that they establish positive interaction with their patients by eliminating the existing language barriers and also ensuring that there are various translators to ensure that the patients receive the necessary treatment.

Stigmatization and discrimination among patients are one of the challenges that tend to affect the relationship between the patient and the nurse since it has been reported to causing delays among patients who require necessary attention. Stigma can be described as a social complex process of evaluating, labelling, and discrimination that tends to involve emotional, behavioural components, and cognitive interconnection (Scanlon, 2006). Stigmatization within the health care unit affects various levels of stratification, which includes: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural stigmatization. Intrapersonal stigmatization involves self-discrimination whereby the individual devaluates themselves about their existing condition. Interpersonal stigmatization requires discrimination between the patient and other members of the society who sees the patient's condition as not acceptable in the community. Structural stigmatization, on the other hand, involves exclusionary and discriminatory policies that have actively been upheld by the law or the system that governs the organization (Arnold, & Boggs, 2019). Stigmatization and discrimination tend to be a significant challenging towards the patient-nurse therapeutic relation and can be acknowledged that there are various existing specific concerns through initiatives that are base on objectives that can be changed.

Since the era of the 1970s, various existing organizations that tend to support the rights of freedom of disabled people have continuously described disability to being a form of oppression. During the process of caregiving, various specific factors are considered to ensure that the patient receives satisfactory services (NapolesSpringer, Santoyo, Houston, PerezStable, & Stewart, 2005). These involved factors within the patient-nurse relationship with people living with disability include:

• The first consideration of the relationship between the nurse and patient involves the patient who requires medical attention and the nurse who is on the receiving end.
• The second consideration factor of the relationship involves personal care, which is given to the patient's practical intervention, whereby the nurse can provide evidence of the ability to take responsibility.
• The third factor is the connection that is recognized when the patient tends to understand the value of the experience that has been offered.

Henceforth patients living with a disability tend to require a more enhanced, strategized and strengthened approach towards their relationship with the nurse to confide in them and also to gain the necessary confidence from the interactive experience to achieve the desired results (Moyle, 2003). Failure for nurses to communicate effectively with individuals living with disabilities tends to be a primary barrier in delivering quality services that are required by individuals living with disabilities.

Maintain the therapeutic relationship between the nurse and the patient requires a multidimensional approach rather than the one-dimensional approach since various patients come to the health care unit with multiple needs and sets of required attitude towards their existing condition. At all-time nurses are always needed to act within the best interest of the patient to maintain a strict relationship which is based on the benefit of the client. The caregivers are required to ensure that the various existing patient needs are met within the high-quality standards while the nurse is capable of still maintaining professionalism.

References

Arnold, E. C., & Boggs, K. U. (2019). Interpersonal Relationships E-Book: Professional Communication Skills for Nurses. Saunders.

Feo, R., Rasmussen, P., Wiechula, R., Conroy, T., & Kitson, A. (2017). Developing effective and caring nurse-patient relationships. Nursing Standard (2014+), 31(28), 54. DOI:10.7748/ns.2017.e10735

Moyle, W., (2003). Nurse-patient relationship: A dichotomy of expectations. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 12(2), 103-109. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-0979.2003.00276.x

NapolesSpringer, A. M., Santoyo, J., Houston, K., PerezStable, E. J., & Stewart, A. L. (2005). Patients' perceptions of cultural factors affecting the quality of their medical encounters. Health Expectations, 8(1), 4-17. DOI:10.1111/j.1369-7625.2004.00298.x

Scanlon, A., (2006). Psychiatric nurses perceptions of the constituents of the therapeutic relationship: a grounded theory study. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 13(3), 319-329. DOI:10.1111/j.1365-2850.2006.00958.x

Timmins, C. L., (2002). The impact of language barriers on the health care of Latinos in the United States: a review of the literature and guidelines for practice. The Journal of Midwifery & Women's Health, 47(2), 80-96. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1526-9523(02)00218-0