The Fundamental Of Nursing: Discussing The Importance Of Caring

The Importance of Caring in Nursing Practice

Question:

Discuss About the Caring Is the Fundamental of Nursing?

In the provision of healthcare services, nursing care involves the passionate and esteemed caring for patients by the registered nurses or other caregivers. The nursing care may be patient-centered care or the centered family care. The nursing profession gets purely focused on the therapeutic interactions between the patient and the nurses. The nursing care acts as a cornerstone practice in the hastening of the patient healing and provision of holistic care. In simpler terms, caring is the central concept amongst the different nursing concepts in the nursing practice (Edvardsson, Watt, & Pearce, 2017). Caring as a nursing fundamental seems to be inherent to the nursing practice and emerges from the respect and mutual concern for the patient. Caring implies to the intentional actions, and positive attitudes and the inner feelings which help to shape the professional interactions which got founded between the nurse and patient. The Nursing and Midwifery Professional Practice supports the caring fundamental of nursing in the better service provision for patients. In this essay, I shall discuss the three characteristics of the therapeutic nursing and give a brief description of how such skills may get implemented to improve the therapeutic value of nursing care. Such therapeutic components include empathy, warmth and trust, and the self-awareness. Although in the process of building the therapeutic relations between the patient and nurse, the Ethics Code of Conduct dictates the nurses not to be too close emotionally to the patients and should learn to uphold the virtue of detachment.

Empathy is an important and crucial nursing attribute in the therapeutic nurse-client relationship in which the patient suffers from a given condition such as dementia or due to old age. Empathy as a concept has got different definitions, but the one that gets commonly used is the one which defines empathy as a conducive environment created by a nurse. The environment makes the patient feel that his/her grievances are understood and accepted for consideration (Maruca, Diaz, Kuhnly, & Jeffries, 2015). The nurse shows empathy to the patient through demonstrating the virtue of kindness and warmth. Furthermore, empathy encompasses the spirit of sharing and the creation of an internal vacuum to accept a person. Thus, a person feels cared for, not left lonely and feels his/her problems are well understood and gets care. Empathy concept applies in collaboration with compassion for a patient. Hence, the compassionate care is a product of showing humane concern for a patient and reciprocating appropriately to his/her needs with humanity in totality, pain relieving and stress management.

In most instances, compassion refers to the act of not only understanding one’s problems but also responding and trying to resolve the issues so as to relieve his/her suffering. Nurses should show empathy and compassion to their patients but should try as much as [possible to retain a greater degree of detachment (Knowles, Hearne, & Smith, 2015). This would facilitate the nurse’s concern on the patients she/he is caring for to become evident while maintaining the emotional separateness. Through the observance of the detachment policy, the nurse would get protected from losing his/her goals for care and tamper with the possibility of burnout. In most cases, caring which occurs empathetically renders a nurse to appear emotionally vulnerable, and result in the consequences of benefiting the patient at a high cost. Therefore, for effective care, nurses should try to balance between the engagement and the detachment. The skill of empathy may get offered through offering pieces of training and workshops for the registered nurses (Bridges, et al., 2013). During the training, nurses get taught the importance of empathy in the nursing care practice. Also, nursing students should get taught on empathy skill in one of their semesters while studying for nursing.

Therapeutic Components of Nurse-Client Relationship

Nursing practice usually encompasses the deep interpersonal relationships between the nurses and the patients. In most cases, the patients are optimistic that nurses should be more tender and kind in the provision of the nursing care services. Besides, the patients have higher expectations on the expression of warmth by their nurses. Patients feel warmth most when the nurses do it in a nonverbal behavior. Most of the patients prefer the nonverbal behavior of expressing warmth for them (Yang, Hargreaves, & Bostrom, 2014). Nurses should show affection to the patients they are caring. The warmth would influence the patient’s outcome. The love shown by nurses would make the patients feel cared for, have companionships to counter loneliness and find someone to share their problems with and by default the nurse. Furthermore, the nurses should work hard to develop trust with their clients. Nurses should follow the Australian Registered Nurses Standards of Practice to acquire patient’s information and keep it privately and confidentially (Arnold & Boggs, 2015). When the patients learn their information is not leaked or shared amongst other patients or the nursing staff, they will develop and build trust on their nurse on duty. With trustworthy, the patients would feel free to share their problems with the nurse on duty with expectations of assistance on the way of solving them.

Moreover, patients share even their secrets without fear since they have created trustworthy enough amongst the nurses providing nursing care services. Through, the act of believing and being trustworthy, nurses would just acquire adequate information from the patients (Mirhaghi, Sharafi, Bazzi, & Hasanzadeh, 2017). Using the obtained information, nurses would analyze and make informed decisions regarding the treatment of the patients. Informed decisions would result in better treatment, and health care services provision since the nurses and specialists would be relying their interventions on the first hand and accurate information got from the admitted client. The warmth and trust skills may get implemented for the betterment of the therapeutic relationships through introducing as a core subject for the nursing students while at school and in nursing placements and also when they get registered as nurses would have practiced it a lot (Dinc & Gastmans, 2013). The nursing students should get informed of the essential attributes warmth and trust skills have towards a better nursing care.

This is a process with an objective for self-examination and is quite crucial and critical in developing the nurse-patient therapeutic relationship. The relationship between the nurse and patient out of self-awareness is essential in the therapeutic healing of patients. Understanding oneself is a vital therapeutic tool for both communication and interpersonal relationship between the nursing care provider and the client (Van der Riet, Rossiter, Kirby, Dluzewska, & Harmon, 2015). The process of understanding oneself or knowing yourself better is quite a difficult task which is time-consuming and stressful. The process does commence with the conscious awareness and the struggle to bring change via the continuous efforts. Self-awareness is a progressive act and requires more conscious efforts. This therapeutic skill requires the nurses to know more about themselves, and by doing, they would be in a good position to build a better therapeutic environment for the provision of nursing care services and healing. Self-awareness is important in molding the professional life of a nurse and assist him/her to develop deep critical thinking and in-depth analysis skills.  Lastly, self-awareness creates a viable ground for the nurse either registered, enrolled or student to understand his/her strengths and weakness.

Empathy as a Crucial Nursing Attribute

It is evident that the much the nurse is self-aware the greater a conducive therapeutic environment for the nursing care get promoted. In nursing practice, the nurses on duty do spend most of the time together with their clients than other fellow health professionals (Raab, 2014). Thus, self-awareness gets perceived as an essential tool for developing a therapeutic relationship. In accordance to Hildegard Peplau, “the central task of the most basic professional school of nursing is viewed as the fullest development of the nurse as a person who is aware of how she functions in a situation” (p. 606). The statement of Hildegard Peplau stresses on the necessity for self-awareness in the nursing education and also, in the provision of better nursing care. Therefore, it is quite recommendable that the nursing curricula be reviewed to include some of the aspects of the development of self-awareness (Leslie, Lonneman, Joa, Testad, & Severinsson, 2015). Moreover, the registered professional nurses should get an opportunity to get guidance and learn more about self. This should get done in a gradual learning process.

Conclusion

Caring is indeed fundamental in the nursing practice, and it gets developed out of the therapeutic nursing. Therapeutic nursing leads to the creation of nurse-client relationship which got termed as a therapeutic relationship. This relationship is important in improving the patient-centered care since it has the basis of mutual trust and respect. Furthermore, it will result out of patient’s faith and hope, the self-sensitivity and feeling for others. In the essay, it is clear that empathy, warmth and trust, and self-awareness are amongst the major therapeutic nursing characteristics necessary for better patient outcome. Compassion encompasses the tender feeling a nurse has toward the suffering of the patient and the response he/she offers. While warmth and trust, show the nurse's closeness with the patient to fight loneliness and developing the patient’s belief and credence. Through trust, a patient would freely share her/his private and confidential with the nurse, thus, facilitating informed decision making and better treatment. Finally, self-awareness is all about oneself understanding and the nurse’s more knowledge about the patient she/he offers nursing care. Self-awareness is an essential tool in developing the therapeutic relationship. All the three therapeutic nursing characteristics get implemented through either introducing them in the nursing curricula for nursing students or creating opportunities for the registered nurses to attend for training since the therapeutic relationship is a continuous learning process.

References

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Mirhaghi, A., Sharafi, S., Bazzi, A., & Hasanzadeh, F. (2017). Therapeutic relationship: Is it still heart of nursing?. Nursing Reports, 7(1).

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Yang, C. P. P., Hargreaves, W. A., & Bostrom, A. (2014). Association of empathy of nursing staff with reduction of seclusion and restraint in psychiatric inpatient care. Psychiatric Services, 65(2), 251-254.