Empathy and Respect:
Refers to the understanding of patient’s feelings and emotional experiences to response and to provide the treatment accordingly. While respect refers to the unconditional positive regard as the mental health patience requires respect and acceptance for being unique or human with different needs. Practicing empathy and respect can assist in making patient comfortable and calm.
Genuineness and Empowerment:
Nurses are required to be genuine in their professional role. This can help in understanding the patient’s state of mind and to remain sensitive for their experiences and conditions. They can also practice empowerment towards the mental health patients to help them control their feelings, increase capacity to act positively and to stimulate their natural healing system (Tolosa et al, 2023).
Source: (Tolosa et al, 2023)
Communication Strategies to engage the Patient in the Care treatment:
Including patients and their families in health care treatment can have positive impacts on patient’s outcomes, their level of satisfaction for the treatment and can reduce the frequency of adverse events such as drug administration, falls and delirium. Communication among nurses and patients increases person-centered care and brings improved health care outcomes. Australian Safety and Quality Health Service Standards provide guidance to improve the consumer-centered health system. While communication is the main technique for delivering consumer centered services (Bucknall et al, 2020).
Some of the strategies to engage patients in the treatment process are:
Recognition:
It refers to acknowledging the patient’s behavior and complimenting him. It helps making them feel noticed, accepted and to draw their attention.
Active Listening:
Nurses can encourage patients to continue talking by practicing active listening and adding verbal and non-verbal cues, in order to make them feel they are being listened and values.
Encourage explanation of perception and experiences:
Patients with hallucinations and sensory issues requires a communication strategy that encourage them to share what they are experiencing. Asking what they heard and what it looks like in a non-judgmental way is important to understand their recovery or current health status (Rivier University, 2023).
Nursing Interventions:
The nursing interventions to manage Schizophrenia are:
- To establish trust: According to the NMBA codes (Cole et al., 2023), it is important for a nurse to build a bond of trust with the patient. This can be done by listening actively to Bob and spending time with him.
- To increase social interaction via group activity therapy: Referring to Pardede and Ramadia (2021), group activity therapy for Schizophrenia patients helps in increasing the social interaction of the patients and engaging them in social activities.
- Patient Safety: It has been found that Schizophrenia patients feel the danger of being harmed, due to hallucinations and delusions (Fišar, 2023), so providing a safe environment to Bob would be a good approach.
Stimuli and hallucination management: Avoiding the factors that might trigger the patient, and explaining to the patient that these hallucinations do not exist in reality would also be a viable nursing management intervention for Bob.
