Caring in Nursing: Conclusion and Personal Reflection

Here is a caring essay in which I will write about personal conclusion and reflection about caring. Caring is defined as compassion and kindness. Caring behaviours determine if a patient feels that the nurse cared about them. Caring will decrease the patient’s length of stay in the hospital, it will decrease complaints, the patients will feel like they are involved in their care and that they are informed about their condition and the treatment.

Patients and families will feel satisfied with the care provided. The nurses will be less anxious to come to an already stressful workplace and will be more satisfied when doing their work, if the patient is content with her/his caring. The emergency department is usually seen as un uncaring place, because of heavy workloads, being short of staff and the stressful environment, to name but a few of the things relating to the nurses being seen as not having time for their patients and not caring about them. As discussed, I raised a few points that my unit has incorporated to meet the caring behaviours, but with further investigation and doing research in my unit we may find ways to improve our caring culture in the unit.

For me the most important aspects were the different behaviours that people see as caring. Learning happened when I started to read through the articles and started to observe these behaviours in my own unit. At the time, I realised some of the behaviours were behaviours that came naturally, and others were implemented through time that changed our behaviours to be more caring. Alternatively, this could be due to complaints received from patients. This is unlike my previous learning because I did reflect many times about my own behaviour during patient care. Like the caring behaviours described this reveals a place for improvement on every nurse’s part. Having experienced the caring behaviours in my own unit, I now realise that for a small emergency room we are doing our best to uphold these caring behaviours, but there is always room for improvement. Additionally, I have learned that treating the patient with care will help them to improve and become independent faster, and that patients do not just focus on your knowledge and skills. I have significantly improved my understanding of the patient’s perception about caring. This makes me feel positive for my next encounter with a patient.

To end up, this knowledge could be useful to me as a practitioner, because I can apply the caring behaviours in the emergency unit on a patient and their family to show them, I care about them, in a way that they perceive caring. Because I do not yet know how to implement more caring behaviours with the limited personnel, I will now need to think of a strategy and discuss it with the unit manager. As a next step, I need to start teaching my shift the caring behaviours and brainstorm with them regarding possible ways to improve caring on our shift, which we can then use as the test phase.