Paper
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
683
Innovative Teaching Strategies for Purposeful Communication with Families
Lois H. Neuman, BSN, MS, PhD, LHNeumanConsultants, Potomac, MD, USA
| Learning Objective #1: discuss five teaching strategies to meet clinical objectives on purposeful communication that address challenges for interacting with families across culture, language, custom, and age.. |
| Learning Objective #2: identify how family involvement can benefit tomorrow's nurse leaders. |
Since purposeful interaction is a vital learning objective in nursing education and practice, repeated unsatisfactory ratings on this skill is not an option. An often overlooked population that will allow nurse educators, students and staff to meet clinical objectives on purposeful communication and geriatrics is the family, especially in long term care settings. The need for communication with families is obvious. Students, caregivers and the elderly in the healthcare delivery setting often differ on demographics by culture, language, customs, and age. Students/staff may be uncertain about their role or how to interact with the family and may refer the family to numerous sources for answers. Family members can be confused, frustrated or angry about a perceived lack of help or abruptness from the students/staff. Family may not be aware of their role in the strange, unfamiliar environment of elder care and may be unsure or uncomfortable in the healthcare domain. An extra layer of complexity appears when language barriers the make purposeful communication especially challenging.
Practical Application/ Innovative Strategy
Since family members often visit regularly for several hours, many effective and basic purposeful communication strategies initiated by the student/staff can resolve misunderstandings quickly, resulting in satisfactory interactions and clinical objective outcomes. This session will offer five specific examples of communication approaches, discuss problems that can arise and escalate, and describe examples of solutions to develop a positive, helping relationship between student/staff and families that benefit everyone involved. Examples will be related to the geriatric setting and objectives but approaches are applicable across multiple settings.