HNB1103 Essay: Therapeutic Communication, Collaboration & Care

This essay delves into the critical role of therapeutic communication skills in nursing, emphasizing their importance in achieving patient-centered care and ensuring safe nursing practice. It identifies core therapeutic communication skills such as empathy, active listening, and the appropriate use of touch and silence, while also addressing potential barriers like excessive workload, language differences, cultural incompetence, and noisy environments. The essay further explores the significance of inter-professional collaboration in delivering patient-centered care, highlighting the elements of responsibility, accountability, and effective communication. Strategies for improving inter-professional collaboration and patient-centered care, including respecting patient autonomy through informed consent and engaging in regular constructive feedback, are also discussed. The essay concludes that by developing these skills and addressing the barriers, nurses can foster strong relationships with patients, leading to improved outcomes and enhanced patient satisfaction. Desklib provides resources like this essay to aid students in their studies.

Running head: THERAPEUTIC COMMUNICATION
THERAPEUTIC COMMUNICATION
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1THERAPEUTIC COMMUNICATION
Therapeutic communication can be defined as the process that involves
communication techniques, which are used by nursing professionals for promoting the well-
being of patients. Therapeutic communication helps nurses to gain the trust of the patients
and develop strong bonds with the patient and has positive outcomes on health of the
patients. Developing inter-professional collaboration with patients and members of
healthcare teams also ensures safe and quality patient centred care that increases patient
satisfaction (Boykins, 2014). This assignment would try to shed more light on the skills of
therapeutic communication and the different barriers that can disrupt therapeutic
communication with patients. It would also discuss in details about the role of
interprofessional collaboration practice for ensuring patient centred care as well as the
strategies which when implemented can help in achieving such care.
Empathy and compassion are two non-verbal communication attributes that need
to be expressed by the nurses while managing the health concerns of patients (Bramhall,
2014). Studies opine that when patients believe that a nurse cares about them, understands
them and thereby feels concerned for them, then a clear communication channel is
developed that helps in strengthening individualised care (Brownie, Scott & Rossiter, 2016).
Nurses need to demonstrate courtesy, kindness as well as sincerity and should devote more
and more time to patients during communication (Kourkouta & Papathanasiou, 2014). It has
been also found that when nursing professional exhibit empathy and compassion while
communicating with the patient, the latter feels comfortable. The patients successfully
overcome anxiety and stress that associates the ill health and being admitted to an alien
healthcare environment. Another important therapeutic communication skill is active
listening. Active listening can be described as the pattern of listening attentively while a
patient speaks, paraphrasing and reflecting back about what is said and withholding any
form of judgement and advice (Prince & Kelley, 2017). While communicating with patients,
nurses should listen attentively to patients providing they full freedom and authority to
speak without interrupting them and cutting them in between. This helps the patients to
believe that nurses are genuinely interested in their care and that they are trying their best
to understand their needs and requirements (Haley et al., 2017). When nurses allow the
patient to narrate everything they want to say, the chances of missing out important

2THERAPEUTIC COMMUNICATION
information about the patient decreases and the needs and expectations of the patients
also can be recognised successfully. This not only helps in providing safe and quality care but
also enhances patient satisfaction (Drahosova & Jarsova, 2016). The non-verbal skills of
touch and silence are also found to be important during therapeutic communication. Using
touch is often considered one of the most potent forms of communication. Comfort touch
like that of holding hands is especially found to be highly effective to vulnerable clients who
are experiencing severe illness. It develops a sense of personal attachment where the
patients feel comfortable and develop the capability of adjusting with the foreign
environment. At the same time, they also gain hope of speedy recovery with the
companionship of the nursing professional. Under certain circumstances, an accepting as
well as attentive silence may be preferable to a verbal response and nurses therefore need
to develop this core therapeutic communication skill (Bassett et al., 2018). This allows the
nurses in temporarily slowing down the pace of the conversation and gives the scope to the
patients in reflecting upon and speaking further about their feelings. In addition, silence
helps nurses in observing the patients for non-verbal clues and in assembling their thoughts.
Sharing hope, humour as well as feelings helps in strengthening the relationships between
patients and nurses and hence such skills need to be developed by nurses. Hagan et al.
(2013) further contributes this knowledge that nurses need to ensure four important
aspects of communication to develop therapeutic relationship with patients and these are
correct approach to patient care, appropriate manner to service users, effective techniques
of interaction with patients and generic aspects of communication.
Often nurses while trying to engage in therapeutic communication with patients can
face various barriers. One of them is excessive work-burden and subsequent feeling of
burnout that nurses might develop while working in the healthcare wards. Nurses are
responsible for not only the comprehensive care of patients but also they are also
responsible for completing the paper-works, ensuring cleanliness of the wards, discharge
procedures, delegation, patient education and many others. Moreover, increases cases of
chronic disorder ailments had also burdened the nurses with more work pressures as
demands of services by patients have increased. Burnouts, tiredness and fatigue might act
as a challenge for ensuring therapeutic communication where the will and the time to
communicate with patients are compromised (Kollar, 2016). Language barrier and cultural

3THERAPEUTIC COMMUNICATION
incompetency can also act as important barrier to therapeutic communication. The inability
to understand the language can result in different misunderstandings as well as
miscommunication and even misdiagnosis. If both nurses and patients cannot understand
each other due to difference in language, it might not only disrupt the therapeutic
communication but will also lead to unsafe patient outcomes. Similarly, a nurse not being
able to communicate with a patient from different cultural backgrounds due to cultural
incompetency can also act as a challenge to therapeutic communication. Ensuring cultural
tradition regarding eye contacts, touch, silence and others during therapeutic
communication is necessary for developing therapeutic relationship with patients. Busy and
noisy environment along with the environment that lacks privacy can act as physical barriers
to effective communication (Chan et al., 2018). On a busy shift in the hospital, the
healthcare environment may be occupied with huge number of people walking by with the
use of different equipments making sounds on the ward along with noisy trolleys rattling in
and out of the ward. The GP surgery treatment might have many people interacting the
nurses when they are trying to talk with the patients with different healthcare teams busy
discussing cases and similar others. Such environment can never help nurses and patients to
get engaged in therapeutic communication because of disturbances, distractions and noises
all around.
Inter-professional collaboration can be achieved when healthcare providers are seen
to work with people from not only within their own professional but also with experts
outside their profession and even with families and patients to achieve the best quality care
that meets the needs and expectations of patients. Doherty and Thompson (2017) had
stated that the complexity of the patient care as well as the need for collaborative working
and shared decision-making should be made the focus of the person centred care and this
results in improvement of the patient experience in practices. Studies opine that inter-
professional collaboration help in optimising patients by improvement of the
communication and teamwork and also helps in promoting the coordination of care across
the continuum of healthcare in all settings (Reeves et al., 2017). The different elements of
Inter-professional collaborative practices mainly include responsibility, accountability as well
as coordination and communication. It also includes cooperation, assertiveness, trust,
respect, and even autonomy. With the help of this form of partnership with the elements

4THERAPEUTIC COMMUNICATION
mentioned, an inter-professional team can be developed that work on common goals to
achieve and improve patient outcomes. Studies have found that some of the main benefits
of inter professional collaboration for nurses, healthcare experts and patients are improved
patient outcomes, reduction in healthcare costs and fewer preventable errors as well as
improved relationship with different disciples (Santana et al., 2018). Specifically, in case of
ensuring patient centred care, the healthcare members of the team should not only
collaborate among themselves but also interact with patients in ways by which they place
them in the centre of the decision-making procedures and include them entirely in their
care processes. It has been found that when healthcare teams collaborate with patients and
families, it help in reduction of anxiety, stress among the latter, and make them feel
empowered. When they feel included in the treatment, their adherence with the treatment
procedures also increases. Thereby they develop trust on the members of healthcare teams.
In this way, inter professional collaboration between nurses, healthcare professionals and
patients and families need to write in a coordinated manner to ensure best success.
One of the most important communication strategies that can help in developing
inter-professional collaboration services and person centred care is respecting the
autonomy and dignity of patients through informed consent and making them the centre of
care planning procedures. In order to collaborate with patients and work in a coordinated
manner, nurses need to gain mutual trust and respect through developing therapeutic
relationship with them (Praudel & Srestha, 2016). Nurses should ask for informed consent
from patients where they would be first discussing about their disorders in details and then
describe the pros and cobs of the treatments. Following this, they should ask for informed
consent where the patients would decide what they would be professionals.
Communicating informed consent helps the patients feel that nurses respect their
autonomy and dignity and this increases their collaborative output. Effective communication
by nurses also encourages them to participate in their own care planning process and be an
active member in their own care. Patients feel empowered and self-confident about their
abilities to cope with the disorders and their anxiety and stress decrease (Jenerette et al.,
2016). In this way, nurses and patients can work collaboratively in ensuring not only patient
centred care but also higher patient satisfaction. Another strategy of developing developing
inter-professional collaboration services with healthcare team members is engaging in

5THERAPEUTIC COMMUNICATION
regular constructive feedback exchange sessions. Here, all the healthcare members would
be discussing about their internal feelings against each other in a team in a constructive
manner and this would prevent any form of ego clashes, misunderstanding and negative
feelings about each other. It would help in maintaining clarity and transparency among the
team members and would help in strong bonds and rapport development. This would help
them to work as a team and provide services to patients with an aim to reach the common
shared gaol.
From the above discussion, it becomes clear that nurses need to develop therapeutic
communication with patients to ensure strong relationship development with patients.
Effective listening skills, empathy and compassion, silence, touch and others are skills of
therapeutic communication that needs to be developed. However, physical barriers like
noisy and busy environments, work-burden and burnouts and cultural incompetency and
language barriers can act as challenges to smooth communication. Inter-professional
collaborates with team members, patients are extremely important to ensure safe, and
quality care as well as patient centred care. Hence, nurses should try to achieve all the
mentioned aspects to become an expert nurse for the future.

6THERAPEUTIC COMMUNICATION
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