Therapeutic and Non-Therapeutic Interactions

This assignment analyzes the article "Therapeutic and Non-Therapeutic Interpersonal Interactions: The Patient's Perspective" by Williams and Irurita (2004), focusing on the importance of psychosocial care and therapeutic communication in patient recovery. It emphasizes the need for healthcare professionals to understand and provide emotional support to patients.

“Therapeutic and non-therapeutic
interpersonal interactions:the
patient’s perspective” - Anne M
Williams
and Vera F Irurita
In the article “Therapeutic and non-therapeutic interpersonal interactions:the patient’s
perspective” the issues related to lack of understanding and emphasis on psychosocial care
during hospitalisation has been discussed. The article focuses on concept of Therapeutic
communication, this communication refers to the art and science of healing of a treatment. The
Therapeutic communication involves exchange of data on basic levels verbal and non-verbal.
Hildegard Peplau was a primary contributor to mental health law reform, she introduced the
effective theories of development stages with relation to the relationship between nurse and
patient. The stages involved orientation stage, identification stage, exploitation stage and
resolution stage. All these stages form a strong and supportive relationship between a nurse and
patient. Communication plays an important role in develop this relationship and it helps in
enhancing the recovery of patient. The main element of this article is determine issues faced by
patients with respect to emotional support or psychosocial care given to the patients in Western
Australia(Williams and Irurita, 2004). It has been observed from a research that emotional
comfort or psychosocial care to the patients helps them to recover faster and enhance the
recovery process. The article stated that there is lack of understanding among hospital staff or

nurses related to psychosocial care that mus be provided to the patients which hospitalised in
order to improve their state of mind. The article concludes that there must be a good knowledge
and understanding related to emotional comfort and psychosocial care among the doctors, nurses
and other staff within a hospital. In other words a hospital staff should focus on the significance
of interpersonal communication a patient experience during hospitalisation. There are various
other factors such as level of security, level of knowing and level of personal value which greatly
affect the interpersonal interactions and state of mind with respect to the patients. Therefore, it
can be concluded from the given article that along with high quality of machines, hospitalisation
facilities and medication the staff of hospital also needs to focus on providing emotional or
psychosocial care to patients. This can be provided by therapeutic and non-therapeutic
interpersonal communication as well as motional care to the patients. Interacting with the
patients also needs a good knowledge of languages and understanding of patients mental
condition while he or she is hospitalized. This is due the importance of communication or
interaction between patient and nurse, without effective interaction social or emotional care can
not be provided.
References
Williams, A. M., & Irurita, V. F. (2004). Therapeutic and non‐therapeutic interpersonal
interactions: the patient's perspective. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 13(7), 806-815. Unpublished
Doctoral Dissertation, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia.