Nurse communication in health education: Patients’ perspective

Abstract

Although nurses have accepted health education as an important role, they are not practicing it in a consistent and structured manner. Several factors have been proposed as an explanation for the discrepancy between expectation and practice of nurses in health education, with ineffective communication being the first. The nurse as a health educator should have appropriate interviewing and communication skills to convey health messages. Nurse should be able to communicate information that helps patients to discover: future or present health problems; more satisfying personal meaning; description about growth and development stages; how to accept or resolve conflict feeling, how to be more creative and become more oriented by self and circumstances. Therefore, this is an exploratory descriptive study, aimed at identifying the perception of patients on nurses' communication during health education. A convenient sample was obtained comprised of 238 patients in medical sections: 100 from Gamal Abd El Naser Hospital and 138 from El Amery University Hospital; both in Alexandria, Egypt. The Health Communication Feedback questionnaire (HCFQ) was used to collect the necessary data. The study revealed that patients at medical section who with chronic medical diseases; generally have a significantly positive perception regarding nurses' communication during health education. Such as: they detected some problems that nurses encountered in this communication; these problems may be in patient him/herself as 46.2% of subjects having pain and can't mutually interact with nurse in health education, or unable to understand nurse's information. In relation to the problems that detected in nurses as perceived by study subjects, lacking of nurse' time and limitation in communication skills. In health settings, the most apparent problems were insufficient facilities or materials for patient teaching and excessive interruptions and crowding. For the perceived problems in relation to health messages, about 45% of patients found jargons in nurses' health messages and 27% of them reported that messages were not attractive or interesting enough. Furthermore, results showed that there is no specific relation between the nature of patients’ chronic disease and their perception regarding nurse communication during health education. Conclusion: This study highlighted the importance of patients’ views for modifying and improving health professionals' performance, which are utilized to provide guidelines and directions to develop better nurses' communication outcomes in health education. Observing, examining and identifying these perceptions will provide recognition and vision for future effective nurse-patient interactions in the health education paradigm.