The Nurse's Role: Seeing Disease Through the Patient's Eyes Essay

This essay explores the contrasting perspectives of physicians and nurses in patient care, highlighting the statement: "The physician looks at the patient through the eyes of the disease while the nurse looks at the disease through the eyes of the patient." It emphasizes the traditional role of nurses in providing compassionate care and addressing patients' needs by understanding their perspective. Nurses maintain constant interaction with patients, allowing them to gain insights into their experiences and inconveniences. This patient-centered approach is crucial for effective care, patient safety, and improving nursing practice. The essay references studies that underscore the importance of articulating compassionate care from the patient's viewpoint, asserting that nurses witness and understand patient suffering in a way that allows them to view disease through the patient's eyes.

If I made the following statement to you, tell me what it means to you:
"The physician looks at the patient through the eyes of the disease while the
nurse looks at the disease through the eyes of the patient."
During difficult times, compassion unites people and developing a trustful relationship
can promote both mental as well as physical wellbeing of a person. The importance of
compassion in care has been a traditional approach since many years. Many literatures indicated
that nurses are meant to provide compassionate care. Also, in order to address the patients’
needs, compassion is considered as an integral part of nursing. Nurses are the only people to
stand beside the bed of a patient all the time and the care experience of the patients is highly
dependent on the performance of the nurses (Bramley & Matiti, 2014). Whilst working, nurses
are meant to keep a constant contact and interaction with the patients and the patients also share
their opinion and inconveniences to the nurses. Therefore, to provide an effective care, and to
maintain patients’ safety, nurses always think from the patients’ perspective (Miller, Lattanzio &
Cohen, 2016). In order to improve the nursing practice, it is important to identify the provision of
delivering compassionate care according to the requirement of the patients. Understanding the
needs from the patients’ perspective can help in recognizing the need of care. Some recent
studies have identified the need for descriptive accounts that are derived from patients’
perspective and also discuss the importance of articulating compassionate care (Bramley &
Matiti, 2014). Starting from the assessment to the whole day care, nurses play the main role and
even they witness the suffering of any patient from a disease. Therefore, in this regard, it can be
said that although, physicians looks at the patients through the eyes of the disease but, nurses
always look at the disease through the patients’ eyes.

References
Bramley, L., & Matiti, M. (2014). How does it really feel to be in my shoes? Patients'
experiences of compassion within nursing care and their perceptions of developing
compassionate nurses. Journal of clinical nursing, 23(19-20), 2790-2799. Retrieved from
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jocn.12537
Miller, S., Lattanzio, M., & Cohen, S. (2016). “Teach-back” from a patient's
perspective. Nursing2018, 46(2), 63-64. Retrieved from
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d691/f249a06a6c836761c153edae1fb38905b53c.pdf