REFLECTIVE ESSAY.

Running head: REFLECTIVE ESSAY
Reflective essay
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REFLECTIVE ESSAY
As a nursing professional, it is crucial to have a clear ideation regarding the
importance or impact of the therapeutic relationship in the professional clinical practice.
Although, many seem to overlook the fact that therapeutic relationship is not just effective
when engaging with a patient of their friends and family, therapeutic relationship is also
extremely beneficial in ensuring mutual respect and easy camaraderie between care providers
(Kangasniemi, Pakkanen & Korhonen, 2015). In this essay, I would attempt to reflect upon
the importance of developing and maintaining professional therapeutic relationships in
healthcare.
First and foremost, the nursing is a professional which is associated with providing
care and support to the sick and ailing, and in the course of that, the nurses encounter a
variety of challenging situations. Such situations can range from challenging behaviour or
lack of response from the patient, ill treatment of misbehaviour from the family members
of the patients, ethical dilemmas during care decision making, and lastly the inevitable
death of a patient. Such challenging or difficult circumstances has a range of perilous
impact on the nurses and their competence (Chadwick & Gallagher, 2016). However, the
psychological health of nurses has tremendous importance; and I personally believe, as
nurses, if we have to deliver optimally safe and effective care at all times, the state of our
physical and mental health status must be optimal as well. The resilience is one attribute
that can help the nurses overcome the challenges and bounce back from any difficult
situation, which can be established successfully using professional therapeutic
relationship in the workplace.
As nurses, stigma and bias is also a very important obstacle that can easily
interfere with the competence or performance of the nurses. For instance, especially for
nurses belonging to culturally diverse backgrounds, the impact of the stigma faced even

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REFLECTIVE ESSAY
inside the professional environment of the facility, by the co-workers even. Along with
that, the profession itself is subjected many orthodox and conventional population or
demographic settings. In this case, communication is the key to overcoming the
stigmatization or bias. In most cases, the lack of awareness and understanding is the main
perpetrator of the stigmatizing attitudes towards the nurses, especially in the socially
backward and remote settings. For such populations, the enhancing the awareness of the
public and increasing their exposure to health care and its multiverse benefits can alter the
stigmatizing attitude towards nurses. Similarly, discrimination or bias faced by the
nursing professionals themselves due to cultural, religious or ethnic differences can also
be bridged effectively by communication (Riley, 2015). Hence, communication is key to
overcoming such challenges or issues faced by nurses every day in practice, and this
effective culturally safe communication practice is impossible to be attained without
successful therapeutic relationship.
Similarly, the personal and professional values of the nurses also has a great
impact on the ability or capability of the nurses to engage in in therapeutic relationships
with consumers, family, peers and community. In my personal beliefs, the impact of
compassion, empathy and justice, a few core personal values are ingrained in an
individual through the whole process of growing up. These values are very difficult to be
incorporated as an external process, and similarly, the impact of these ingrained values
help nurses to recognize the need for compassion and empathy in their care procedures,
even in the process of development of therapeutic relationship. Similarly, the impact of
lack of these values can lead to disrupting the process of developing the therapeutic
relations with patients, their family, and co-workers as well (Giger, 2016).
Hence, maintaining integrity and personal pliancy, which relates significantly with