Nursing professionals have a key role in ensuring that all patients are provided with optimal care. They work as a team with doctors, other nurses, physical therapists, social workers, psychologists, dieticians, and many other healthcare professionals to provide their patients with top-notch care while they are hospitalized or at home. Beside possessing expertise acquired through a nursing degree program, other qualities contribute to nursing professional success. Here are 5E top qualities of a great nurse:
1) Empathy to identify patient’s needs
Empathy is the heart of nursing, numerous studies have concluded that empathy is a major component to quality care. Empathy is the ability to feel what another person is experiencing from their point of view, putting themselves in their patients’ shoes and trying to understand how they perceive what’s going on around them. Nurses who express empathy show that they are committed to all of a patient's needs rather than just their vital signs, symptoms and medical status.
2) Emotional stability
A nurse’s job is mentally demanding, tough situations are all in a day’s work for a nurse. Effectively managing the needs of the health team, patients and their family members while remaining calm when faced with upsetting experiences is essential. Nurses give care and psychological support while must be able to control their focus on the tasks at hand. Research shows that emotionally stable nurses are better able to concentrate, solve problems and keep their patients safe.
Emotional stability should never be confused with a lack of emotions or empathy. Like empathy, emotional stability is a skill that can be learned, but it takes time and nurses need to be patient with themselves.
3) Excellent communication
As a bridge between patients, doctors and family members, nurses never stop collecting and presenting critical data. If someone drops the ball, the consequences can cause significant harm. Errors transcribing medication orders, missing information on hospital discharge paperwork and life-threatening allergies not listed in a patient's chart are common medical mistakes attributed to lack of communication.
Communication is also a therapeutic tool healthcare providers use to build interpersonal relationships:
- Through proven verbal and non-verbal techniques, therapeutic communication helps nurses make patients feel more relaxed and willing to share their concerns. Lack of information about an illness, for example, can be a major source of fear and anxiety for patients.
From breaking down the barriers that block effective communication between colleagues in the health team, therapeutic communication is the skill nurses use every day to establish a sense of trust.
4) Efficient time management
Everything in healthcare is time-sensitive. Giving medications, for example, is a large part of most nurses’ responsibilities and regulations strictly govern administration times. Doses given early or late can delay procedures and significantly affect outcomes.
Nurses make it all work by planning, prioritizing, delegating and making the most of every minute. Computers in healthcare facilities, for example, use software that organises task lists, sets up reminder systems and reorganises priorities as they change. Most are even customizable to match a nurse’s preferences, and they eliminate laborious handwritten checklists.
5) Ethics
A strong sense of right and wrong helps nurses work through challenges and gives them a moral compass with which to consistently make decisions that are in a patient’s best interests, especially when the right thing to do isn’t obvious.
From advocating for a patient's wishes to telling them the truth about their condition, even when it’s something they’re uncomfortable hearing, situations occur every day in a nurse’s life that require ethical behaviour, and it’s the very foundation upon which trusting therapeutic relationships are built.
Future of Nursing
The future starts now, the areas for action in nursing are clear. Most important to keep in mind is that not only being able to generate the right qualifications and attitudes, but also having good technology and sound knowledge with which to identify priority health problems is important.
- Telehealth with chatbot service makes it easier to access and deliver care. Telehealth is born for nurses and other healthcare providers who can use the technology to manage patients with mobility challenges and/or patients who are at especially high risk if exposed to the coronavirus.
- Nurses with technological skills will be in high demand. Nurses today use a wide range of technologically driven approaches to increase their efficiency, including Electronic Health Records to track health history and Smart Beds to optimize patient positioning.
- More nurses will choose to specialize, nursing is a career where there is greater demand at higher levels of practice than the lower ones. Nurses who choose to specialize find that they are in higher demand and can often command higher salaries.
