Communication problems between nurses and patient's family

ABSTRACT

Communication between the nurse and the patient's family is a significant aspect of nursing practice. This paper presents the results of a research aimed to characte-rize problematic situations that occur in the relations involving nurses and patients' relatives: I) the type and frequency with which nurses deal with problematic situa-tions involving the patient's relatives in the context of their professional activity; II) the level of difficulty in dealing with these situations; and III) the psychological exhaustion they cause. The research focused on nurses of two clinical services of a public hospital: an In-tensive Care Unit and an Emergency Department. The methodological approach to this study is quantitative and has a descriptive and correlational nature. A question-naire was elaborated for the collection of data, contemplating questions related to the objective of the research. From a total of 99 nurses of the two clinical services, 50 were interviewed. The results show that there are statistically significant differences between the two services regarding the frequency with which nurses are threatened and intimi-dated, being more frequent in the emergency department. The insistent demand for information on the part of the family members constitutes the situation with greater occurrence and, simultaneously, the situation that causes greater impact on nurses. The lack of preparation stands out for the way it correlates with the wea-riness of nurses caused by requests of confidential information by the family on the patient's health status (rs = -0,473; p < 0.05) and the insistent search for information on the part of the relatives (rs = -0.416; p < 0.05)

RESUMEN

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