Reflection On Communication In Nursing

Look Back Over the past three weeks of clinical practice, one event that personally stood out to me was when I would communicate and interact with patients that are diagnosed with dementia and depression. The situation is very meaningful to me as a student nurse because these topics were taught and evaluated from the online Gentle Persuasive Approach Modules and it was a challenge to perform those skills for the first time in an actual health care setting. Interacting with people with Dementia is much more complex than it seems and did cause situations to arise which is the very reason I chose this topic to reflect upon from my clinical practice.

Elaborate

On the first day of clinical, our group walked into the floor to tour

I did not know what actions to take and thought that every patient who had these diagnoses and from what I learned from school is all treated the same way. I could not really take a grasp of what was happening and was only aware that I had a resident who refused to continue with morning care and was agitated. My initial hypothesis was that the way I communicated to this resident during a behavioural episode caused her to have more agitation. My view towards communicating and providing care to patients with both dementia and depression has changed since this event and because of the research from scholarly articles. According to (Gutzmann & Qazi, 2015) a study was performed to focus on strategies on how health care professionals can provide care to residents with depression and dementia. An effective way to communicate to these residents is knowing their capabilities and limitations of cognitive functioning that impacts their daily living activities. (Gutzmann & Qazi 2015). From this article, I have learned that you need to understand the patient 's personal diagnosis as an individual and their own methods of communicating to improve their quality of life as our primary

Therefore, this situation revised what I believed was the right way to care for a resident with dementia and depression. If I can perform morning care for this resident over again, based on my analysis, I would first talk to someone who is knows this patient more than I do to get an insight of her behaviours and treat this resident as an individual instead not grouping her under the term of depression and dementia which leads to providing care for this resident the same way I would treat any person with dementia and depression. Calling the nurse to for help and questions is an action I believe I should preserve as a first year nursing student. My nurse had more experience in these situations and she wanted to teach me by doing it independently but also help me at the same time which increased my self confidence greatly instead of discouraging