NURSES AND THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

Nurses and Therapeutic Relationship with their Clients

Nurses and Therapeutic Relationship with their Clients

Introduction

The therapeutic relationship between nurse and client can be described as being useful to the client. In the nursing context helping means that the nurse gets to know their client in order to provide direct aid and knowledge to them, as well as interpersonal support. Therapeutic can be defined as healing and growth and can be seen as the purpose of nursing. Nursing is understood to mean a therapeutic helping relationship devoted to promoting, restoring, and maintaining the health of individuals, families, groups, and communities. Having an effective relationship and caring for the client are seen as essential to nursing care. Nurses are expected to be knowledgeable and skillful in helping.

Discussion

In recent years, the role of nursing has acquired a special role in terminality through palliative care. Palliative care is understood as the total attendance, which has continuous active clients and their families by help of an interdisciplinary team when the expectation is not healing. The primary goal is to provide quality of life for the client and his family, without trying to lengthen or shorten survival specifically, it being necessary to meet the physical, psychological, social and spiritual fundamentally. Therefore, all the issues related to effective client-nurse partnership in a client centered model of care will be discussed in detail.

Therapeutic Relationship Attributes

To have a therapeutic helping relationship it is vital that the nurse trusts them self as well as others, as for the relationship to progress the client and nurse need to place confidence in each other. Caring is an interpersonal process, and having interpersonal trust means that one person in the relationship believes that the other person can be relied and depended on.

Therapeutic helping involves the nurse having communication competence. Parbury (2009, p.52) state that 'nurses must be competent communicators if they are going to develop their own personal sense of agency and use their interactions with clients to be of assistance and to provide help.' There are two types of skills involved in this, those of being responsive and those of being assertive. Another aspect of therapeutic helping is having patience, often clients take time to allow us to care for them. Rather than being 'task orientated', nurse should be focused on client centred care. Therapeutic helping also involves the nurse having hope in the respect that in working with people we need to believe in their ability to overcome their problems in their own way. Courage is another part of the helping relationship in order to share ourselves with another person.

In short, therapeutic helping in the nursing context involves a variety of inter-personal skills. Having trust, patience, courage as well as communication competence are amongst the many qualities needed in therapeutic helping. Having the client at the centre of care is essential for effective relationships in healthcare. Requiring the knowledge, nurses are able to give the client/patient as much information as ...