Making Connections In Nursing Paper

As a first year nursing student, it is important to understand the impact that making connections with your patients has on their overall health outcomes. Before one can understand the importance of making such connections, it is imperative to explore how these connections are made. The purpose of this paper is to establish the importance of making connections in the nurse-client relationship, to recount my personal learning of a course concept, and to explore how the course concept is integral in the formation of connection in the nurse-client relationship. The course concept that I will explore is that of trust. I will explore this concept as it relates to making connections with the help of current nursing literature. Throughout the paper

A commonality in many definitions of trust is that it is deeply personal. Because of this deeply personal nature, understanding the concept of trust helps the nurse to form a better understanding of what the patient is undergoing. When a nurse realizes that their patient is having difficulty trusting them, it may indicate that the patient is having a more difficult time with their hospital stay overall, or that they are experiencing more negative emotions than the nurse had originally perceived. A patient who has had poor experiences in the past may be less willing to trust than one who has had positive experiences (Rutherford). In this case, when a nurse observes a patient who is unwilling to trust, she can attempt to alleviate fears that may be related to a previous experience, and therefore improve not only the patient’s experience, but the quality of the nurse-client relationship and care overall. Trust can be especially imperative to understanding the patient’s experiences when treating a mental illness. Trust is a large component of positive nurse-client relationships, which can be especially difficult to form in patients with mental illness. However, when trust is formed between a care provider and a mental health patient, it can be drastically beneficial, resulting in many positive outcomes including increased self-esteem (Murray, Crawford,

Through my research I was able to understand just how important trust is to the nurse-client relationship, and in turn made sure to create a bond of trust between myself and the client in my therapeutic interaction. According to Arnold & Boggs (2011) components of communication, such as an open exchange of information, can have a big hand in the formation of trust. Because of this reflection I was sure to include an open exchange of information in my interaction, avoiding having the patient do the vast majority of the talking, but also being careful to adhere to appropriate self-disclosure. It is indicated that due to the status of the nursing profession, people tend to easily put a trust into nurses; Hertzberg (1988) and Lagnespetz (1992) say “trust appears to be extended to the nurse by the patient unless the nurse does something to break or damage this covenant” (as cited in Rutherford, 2014, p. 285). This caused me to carefully analyze my interaction, and ask myself is any of my words or actions could possibly be perceived by the client in such a manner that would damage the covenant of trust. It is especially important to avoid damaging the bond of trust between a nurse and their patient all together as opposed to understanding how to