1. Communication Skills: Medium for All Nursing Practice
Chapter 6
Communication Skills: Medium for All Nursing Practice

2. Communication Therapeutic Communication
-Essential in all settings of nursing care
Communication Process
-Process of receiving and sending messages
-Stimulus: one person has need to communicate with another
-Sender: person sending message initiates contact
-Message: information expressed or sent
-Media: how message is sent-hearing, visual, tactile, smell or combination
-Receiver: person receiving the message, interprets and responds to sender by providing feedback

3. Nurse-patient interview
Peplau principles guiding communication process
-Clarity: ensures the meaning of message is accurately understood by both parties
-Continuity: promotes connections among ideas and feelings, events, or themes conveyed in those ideas
Factors that affect communication
-Personal factors
-Environmental factors
-Relationship factors

4. Levels of communications
-Verbal Communication
Consists of words a person speaks
Conveys beliefs, values, perceptions, meanings
Words are culturally perceived
-Nonverbal Communication
Cues (physical appearance, facial expression, body posture, amt eye contact, eye cast, hand gestures, signs, fidgets and yawning
Communication is 10% verbal and 90% nonverbal

5. Communication process
Content congruent with process is healthy
When verbal message is not reinforced by communicators actions , message is ambiguous, or double (mixed) message
Double-bind message
-Message sent to create meaning but also used to defensively to hide what is going on , create confusion and attack relatedness

6. Effective communication for nurses
Goals
-Feel understood and comfortable
-Identify and explore problems relating to others
-Healthy ways of meeting emotional needs
-Experience satisfying interpersonal relationships
Tools to communicate with pts
-Silence
-Active Listening
-Clarifying Techniques

7. Nontherapeutic techniques
Asking excessive questions
-Closed ended questions
-Lack of respect and sensitivity
Giving approval or disapproval
Advising
-Rarely helpful
Asking “why” questions
-Imply criticism

8. Communication and cultures
Goal
-To formulate a therapeutic alliance
Problematic areas for nurse interpretation of verbal and nonverbal messages of pt
-Communication Styles
-Eye Contact
-Touch
-Cultural Filters

9. Effective communication
-Nurses knowing what to convey, communicating what is meant to pt and comprehending the meaning
-Most effective when they use nonthreatening and open-ended communication techniques
-Skill that develops over time and integral to establishment and maintenance of a therapeutic alliance