Skills and Abilities
Being a nurse requires many crucial skills and abilities that are used on a daily basis in this career. Nurses work in all different settings and situations. Having a background in skills developed throughout a nurse’s life will greatly benefit them while caring for others. Compassion is very important when it comes to giving care, it can help create a trusting and meaningful relationship between the nurse and their client. Infection Control is also important to all healthcare professionals. It aids in stopping the spread of diseases and infections from one patient to another. One of the most basic foundations when it comes to one’s career is communication. It is needed to advocate and understand patients wants and needs.
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Hand hygiene is an extremely vital precaution when working as a nurse. It is one of the most effective ways to stop the spread of pathogens throughout the working environment.
Hand hygiene is now regarded as one of the most important element of infection control activities. In the wake of the growing burden of health care associated infections (HCAIs), the increasing severity of illness and complexity of treatment, superimposed by multi-drug resistant (MDR) pathogen infections, health care practitioners (HCPs) are reversing back to the basics of infection preventions by simple measures like hand hygiene. (CNO, 2015)
There are many ways infectious agents can be spread. These may include; skin to skin contact, contaminated objects, body fluid contact, and can even be airborne. Since these pathogens are easily spread, hand hygiene needs to be performed many times a day, all day. Other ways nurses can control the spread of infection is by using the proper PPE while assisting patients with different illnesses. For example, a nurse dealing with contact precautions would be wearing gloves and a gown, but when a nurse is dealing with droplet precautions, gloves, a mask and a gown would need to be worn. Most PPE items are disposable and need to be taken off immediately after exposure to an infected patient. This helps to stop the spread of infections from
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A nurse needs communication skills when engaging with a patient, their family or coworkers. This ability is especially key when providing effective advocacy for a patient. A nurse can use communication when advocating for a client by knowing patient rights and knowledge about the health care system. This is able to help the nurse educate patients on how to achieve better care and give them ongoing support.
“Advocating means talking about the client’s wishes with the right people, with the aim of honoring those wishes. Advocacy should involve communicating in a way that supports the best care possible for the client, while helping the health care team understand the client’s wishes”. (Mathur, 2011).
The value of communication is also vital when it comes to maintaining the lives of others. Without proper communication between a client, nurse, and even coworkers, many symptoms can go unknown and the proper medication may not be given. This could result in an illness worsening, or even in death. Listening is also extremely meaningful in nurse-client relationships. This can help a nurse gain insight on how the patient is feeling and what they can do to help if they have any problems. Devoting your time to communicating with a patient is also important. By showing them courtesy, kindness and that you generally care, it can influence someone to open up and gain self-esteem when sharing
Firstly, communication is the most essential component in nursing profession. In every workplace, communication contains writing, speaking, listening and identifying others ways to interact. According to Dwyer 2012, communication is the process of sending and receiving information between two or more people. In nursing profession, communication plays a crucial role in patient’s health and workplace to run smoothly and effectively. In this field nurses have to interact with patients, families, doctors and health professionals to provide information and quality care. In nursing profession nurses have to deal with different types of patient. For instance; deaf, disable, you...
As a result of this, interprofessional communication is important if nurses and other professionals are to deliver quality care and meet the health needs of the service user. Goodman and Clemow (2010) suggest that nurses must communicate safely and effectively with service users, professionals and other service provider using respect, care, compassion and dignity.
This literature review will analyze and critically explore four studies that have been conducted on hand hygiene compliance rates by Healthcare workers (HCWs). Firstly, it will look at compliance rates for HCWs in the intensive care units (ICU) and then explore the different factors that contribute to low hand hygiene compliance. Hospital Acquired infections (HAI) or Nosocomial Infections appear worldwide, affecting both developed and poor countries. HAIs represent a major source of morbidity and mortality, especially for patients in the ICU (Hugonnet, Perneger, & Pittet, 2002). Hand hygiene can be defined as any method that destroys or removes microorganisms on hands (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009). According to the World Health Organization (2002), a HAI can be defined as an infection occurring in a patient in a hospital or other health care facility in whom the infection was not present or incubating at the time of admission. The hands of HCWs transmit majority of the endemic infections. As
“Communication is the heart of nursing… your ability to use your growing knowledge and yourself as an instrument of care and caring and compassion” (Koerner, 2010, as cited in Balzer-Riley, 2012, p. 2). The knowledge base which Koerner is referring to includes important concepts such as communication, assertiveness, responsibility and caring (Balzer-Riley, 2012). Furthermore, communication is complex. It includes communication with patients, patient families, doctors, co-workers, nurse managers and many others. Due to those concepts and the variety of people involved, barriers and issues are present. Knowing how to communicate efficiently can be difficult.
Nurses today need to have excellent communication skills. Receiving information from patients is the most important aspect of nursing. If nurses are unable to communicate with their patient then they would not be able to have a relationship with them. Communication is where two or more people interact with each other, by using sounds and words, this is verbal communication. Some individuals have different behaviors where they try to express themselves to others without using spoken words, this is non verbal communication. Once nurses have the proper communication tools, techniques and evidence based practice, when communicating with their patient, they would get the necessary information needed from the patient to properly diagnosis them.
In Nursing, there will always be instances where the patient's nurse needs to advocate for their patient. There are numerous reasons why a nurse would advocate for their patient ranging from getting the doctor to change the patient’s orders, helping the patient’s treatment team understand what it is the patient is requiring for the day, to expressing the patient’s last wishes before death. In every situation, the nurse should do what is in the patient’s best interest. Tomajan (2012), “Advocacy skills are the ability to successfully support a cause or interest on one’s own behalf or that of another. Advocacy requires a set of skills that include problem solving, communication, influence, and collaboration”(p. 2). With those skills, the nursing staff will be able to work together to advocate for their patients. Along with those skills, nurses need to keep in mind the three core attributes that are: safeguarding patients’ autonomy; acting on behalf of patients; and championing social justice in the provision of health care. (Bu & Jezewski, 2006)
In nursing practice, communication is essential, and good communication skills are paramount in the development of a therapeutic nurse/patient relationship. This aim of this essay is to discuss the importance of communication in nursing, demonstrating how effective communication facilitates a therapeutic nurse/patient relationship. This will be achieved by providing a definition of communication, making reference to models of communication and explaining how different types of communication skills can be used in practise.
Communication in the nursing practice and in healthcare is important because when talking with patients, their families, and staff, the nurse and the nursing student needs to be able to efficiently express the information that they want the other person to understand. “Verbal communication is a primary way of transmitting vital information concerning patient issues in hospital settings” (Raica, 2009, para. 1). When proper communication skills are lacking in nursing practice, the chances of errors and risks to the patient’s safety increases. One crucial aspect of communication that affects the patient care outcome is how the nurse and the nursing student interacts and communicates with the physicians and other staff members. If the nurse is not clear and concise when relaying patient information to other members of the healthcare team the patient care may be below the expected quality.
The introduction paragraph gives information on communication and the impact that it has on patient-nurse relationships. It gives the reader an understanding of what is involved in true communication and how that it is a fundamental part of nursing and skills all nurses need. It leads those interested in delivering quality nursing to read on. Showing us the significance that communication makes in the
Communication is an important concept of caring in nursing because the nurse has to know how to communicate efficiently in order to get the patient to trust the nurse enough to open up to the nurse and also the nurse needs to communicate respectfully to show the patient that they genuinely do care about their health and want to help them as much as they
The systematic review; Interventions to improve hand hygiene compliance in patient care, conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration investigated inventions to improve hand hygiene compliance within patient care. The review included 2 original studies with an additional two new studies (Gould & Moralejo et al., 2010). Throughout the review it was affirmed that among hand hygiene is an indispensable method in the prevention of hospital-acquired infections (HAI), the compliance among nurses’ is inadequate. Nurses are identified within the public as dependable and trustworthy in a time of vulnerability due to their specialised education and skills (Hughes, 2008). Thus, it is imperative that evidence based practice is cond...
This step is especially important to healthcare workers. Interacting with patients and treating them can expose you to infectious diseases. According to Five Things You Can Do To Prevent Infection (2015), “Doctors, nurses, dentists and other health care providers come into contact with lots of bacteria and viruses. Healthcare providers should wear gloves when they perform tasks such as taking throat cultures, pulling teeth, taking blood, touching wounds or bodily fluids, and examining your mouth private parts.” In the healthcare community it is recommended to treat every patient as if they were infected. This means to not only wash hands before and after patients, but to also apply gloves when treating patients as
“Researchers in London estimate that if everyone routinely washed their hands, a million deaths a year could be prevented” (“Hygiene Fast Facts”, 2013, p. 1). Hands are the number one mode of transmission of pathogens. Hands are also vital in patient interaction, and therefore should be kept clean to protect the safety of patients and the person caring for the patient. Hand hygiene is imperative to professional nursing practice because it prevents the spread of pathogens, decreases chances of hospital-acquired infections, and promotes patient safety. There is a substantial amount of evidence that shows why hand hygiene is important in healthcare
The World Health Organization (WHO) developed guidelines on hand hygiene in healthcare with a global prospective to support hand hygiene promotion and improvement in healthcare facilities worldwide. Hand hygiene can be defined as handwashing, antiseptic handwash, antiseptic hand rub, or surgical hand antisepsis. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the rationale for hand hygiene are the potential risks of transmission of microorganisms to patients, healthcare worker colonization or infection caused by organisms acquired from the patient, morbidity, mortality, and costs associated with healthcare-acquired
There are some organisms from the patient’s own body. During providing care and treatment services to patients, health care workers may become the reservoirs of those organisms. Therefore, it has a high chance of cross-contamination from health care worker and patients in health care setting.Hand hygiene is the infection control measures for preventing health care-associated infections which called nosocomial infection. Here are two hand hygiene methods which are hand washing with soap and hand rub with alcohol concentrations between 62% and 95% can reduce the pathogens on