Nursing Communication Reflection: Enhancing Patient Interaction Skills

This essay provides a reflective analysis of three communication strategies—open-ended questions, paraphrasing, and seeking clarification—applied during clinical nursing practice. The author discusses the benefits and challenges of each strategy, highlighting areas for improvement in future interactions. Specifically, the reflection covers the importance of clear and coherent speech when asking open-ended questions, the need for empathy and sensitivity while paraphrasing, and maintaining patience during clarification processes. The conclusion emphasizes the value of self-reflection in identifying weaknesses and enhancing overall communication skills to improve patient care and build stronger therapeutic relationships. The goal is to foster more effective and patient-centered communication in future nursing practice.

Running head: NURSING ASSIGNMENT
NURSNG ASSIGNMENT: COMMUNICATION REFLECTION
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author note

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Introduction
Communication is an effective and crucial aspect of quality and holistic care process. As
per Bramhall
(2014), the effective interpersonal communication skill of nursing professionals are
directly proportionate to the healthcare benefits of the community as communication with
patients helps them to educate about self- management abilities, make them compatible to
improved healthcare behavior and hence, helps to achieve the healthcare goals of the patient
(Philip, Manias and Woodward‐Kron 2015). The primary aim of this reflective paper is to
provide details of the three communication aspects, which I applied while my patient interaction
and then would provide a details of the areas of therapeutic communication which requires
improvement for future practices.
Body
Open- ended questions
Unlike close ended questions, where the scope of replies are limited, open-ended
questions provide the patients with the opportunity to express their mental, emotional and other
complications which they think is responsible for their healthcare complication (Henderson,
Barker and Mak, 2016). Therefore, as per Sahay, Hutchinson and East (2018), application of
open- ended questionnaire in interview process helps to achieve fuller information and ensures a
free ventilation so that patients could express as per their thinking and needs. While working on
my clinical practice, I applied open-ended questions while engaging with the family members so
that through the effective communication process, patient’s medication history, healthcare
complications, their emotional history and mental health could be assessed (Cleary, Jackson and

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Hungerford 2014). Hence, through the help of these informations I was able to develop plan of
care for the related patients. However, while conducting interviews, I observed that my pace,
choice of medical terms and accent was difficult for the patient to understand and hence I had to
repeat my questions multiple times. Therefore, in my future interview sessions, I would use slow
and coherent speech, with lucid and general terms so that I could engage the patient in the
conversation effectively.
Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing in nursing profession is determined as the process, using which the
information provided by the patient in general speech is rephrased into medical terms and then
restated informant of the patient so that they could understand the statement effectively
(Bramhall 2014). Therefore, through proper restatement of the words in the information provided
by the patient, proper emphasis on the primary concern could be achieved (Wong et al. 2014).
While my clinical placement, while communicating with people who are unable to speak English
or speak broken English, I used to restate their words by paraphrasing so that I could document
them properly and could make the patients understand their concern. Hence, I was able to
maintain effective and accurate documentation with conducting patient education. However,
upon reflecting on the event, I could understand that there may be some instances where my
rephrasing or paraphrasing sentences could affect the patients negatively as they would become
stigmatized to speak borne or improper English in the healthcare facility, Hence, in near future,
while applying this communication process I would be more considerate and would show
empathy so that patients could speak freely and provide me with the crucial and important
information about their healthcare complications.

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Seeking clarification
While conducting care process with patients, there are instances where patients’
informations contradicts each other and creates confusion for the healthcare professionals as it
becomes critical for them to assess and develop care plan (Henderson, Barker and Mak, 2016). In
this situation, this communication strategy is applied which helps the nursing professionals to
clarify the information that the patents’ share with them. In nursing profession, clarification
holds a tremendous importance as inclusion of this helps the nursing professionals to understand
all the patient information, connect all the cues and then develop care plan so that effective care
could be provided to the patients (Philip, Manias and Woodward‐Kron 2015). While conducting
my clinical practices in healthcare facilities, I faced several patients who were unable to convey
their healthcare informations to the healthcare professionals. One such patient, who were
stammering and was unable to share his complications properly. Hence, I communicated with
him and then clarified all the information with his family members in an open-ended
communication process so that clarification of all the informations could be collected and
included in his clinical process. However, while conducting communication with the patient, I
lost my patience several times, that affected the effective communication process. Hence, in my
future practices, I would be concentrating on my effective communication process so that the
patient could be engaged in the care process further to maintain the patience in the
communication process.
Conclusion
While reflecting on these three communication process that I applied in my clinical
practice I was able to find the loopholes and drawbacks in my process and hence, this process
was effective for to develop my care and communication process in future. I was able to

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understand the benefits of these communication process and was able to identify my lacks which
is the most effective aspect of this reflection process.

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References
Bramhall, E., 2014. Effective communication skills in nursing practice. Nursing Standard
(2014+), 29(14), p.53. DOI:10.7748/ns.29.14.53.e9355
Cleary, M., Jackson, D. and Hungerford, C.L., 2014. Mental health nursing in Australia:
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40.DOI: https://doi.org/10.3109/01612840.2013.836261
Henderson, S., Barker, M. and Mak, A., 2016. Strategies used by nurses, academics and students
to overcome intercultural communication challenges. Nurse education in practice, 16(1), pp.71-
78.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2015.08.010
Philip, S., Manias, E. and Woodward‐Kron, R., 2015. Nursing educator perspectives of overseas
qualified nurses' intercultural clinical communication: barriers, enablers and engagement
strategies. Journal of clinical nursing, 24(17-18), pp.2628-2637.DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.12879
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relationships on safe medication practice: A pilot study of Australian graduate nurses. Nurse
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