In most healthcare facilities the very first contact that the patient will have with the staff will come from nurses assigned to the front desk. Furthermore, once they are admitted and hospitalized, most of their daily interactions will be with nurses coming to check up on them, to administer medications, and to provide aid when necessary. In this sense, communicating effectively with both patients and coworkers is a quintessential skill that all nurses should strive to achieve if they don’t have it already.

On a more professional level, nurse-patient communication is important for your career because it is one of the primary domains on which the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) are scored. The patients will answer several questions about whether the nurse treated them with courtesy and respect, listened to them intently, and if they explained properly the concepts and procedures that they would undergo. In some cases, these survey results may affect your odds of landing a promotion, on the organization’s reputation and, in some reimbursement models, your wages.

In terms of effective communication, the CAHPS survey highlights two important areas:

• Creating a positive, warm, and compassionate patient experience
• Creating meaningful patient engagement and delivering patient education

However, these two objectives are often difficult to achieve, especially due to the advances in new technologies, which detract from meaningful nurse-patient relationships in lieu of providing better care. Still, there are certain strategies that can be implemented in the workplace, and which are designed specifically to nurture the nurse-patient relationship to create a strong rapport between these two individuals. The end goal of these strategies is to create an environment of trust and confidence to allow the healthcare process to flow smoothly.

The CAHPS mentions three main areas of focus through which the nurse can create meaningful relationships with their patients. Read on to learn more about these areas.

Strong Interpersonal Relationship Skills

The most direct way of forging meaningful bonds with patients is by fostering a strong interpersonal relationship with them. Through these bonds, the healthcare process will flow easily, and the patients will be able to adopt an active role in their recovery.

There are certain actions that a nurse can perform to improve the patient’s perception of them. For instance, sitting next to them during a regular checkup has been proven to increase the patient’s satisfaction by more than 30%. Similarly, adopting simple communication strategies can help to streamline the workflow when the nurse has an overcrowded schedule. In this sense, when delivering compassionate, individualized care is not an option due to time constraints, these communicational skills will allow the patient to feel at ease and cared for, even though the nurse won’t be able to spend much time conversing and reassuring them.

To this end, Claudia Allen JD, Ph.D., a researcher at the University of Virginia developed the Background, Affect, Trouble, Handling, and Empathy (BATHE) method, designed to only take five minutes. This method involves open-ended communication to engage the patient at a personal level in order to create meaningful bonds. In short, this method consists of asking several personal questions about the person’s preferred nickname, their family, and about their likes and interests. With this, the nurse can make a connection through the anecdotal evidence they collect. In future interactions, they can invoke these links to foster a stronger relationship and to reduce both the physical and emotional distress experienced by the patient.

Proper Communication Skills

It is very important that the patient understands completely the implications of what the procedures that they are undergoing entail. To this end, “Patient teach-back” is one of the leading patient education strategies, which revolve around the nurse asking the patient to repeat their version of what a concept, instruction, or other health information entails.

According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), health centers should begin to develop standardized teach-back skills by creating a team dedicated to this. This team should focus on training the staff on the proper use of this method, as well as to teach the patients about it. In the latter, it’s important that the patient understands that they are not being judged, nor tested. Instead, they must know that teach-back is a tool designed to ensure that they completely understand the information, as well as to identify the areas in which the nurse would need to emphasize.

The Technological Means

With the advances in technology, hospitals now have better means of introducing the patients to their facilities without ever having to give them a lengthy tour or talk. Bedside tablets are great instruments for fostering a better understanding of the services provided by the facility in which they are hospitalized. Furthermore, a properly implemented system that can seamlessly connect to all the bedside tablets can also optimize the use of the nurse call lights and buttons by simply adding it as a function in the device’s UI.

However, to reduce the impact that these technological advances have on the nurse-patient relationship, the nurse must always try to engage the patient for the first time without using technology. In the moment of the first encounter, the BATHE method can be used for creating a meaningful bond before introducing them to their bedside tablet.

In short, nurses will need to strike a perfect balance of compassion, clinical expertise, and technology services in order to create a proper bond with their patients to ensure that the recovery process flows smoothly.