Mental Health Nurse Communicating with a Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Client: Health, Medicine, Nursing Essay

Mental Health Nurse Communicating with a Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Client
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Mental Health Nurse Communicating with a Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Client
Communication in healthcare is a fundamental practice that determines the quality of health and human wellbeing outcomes. Nurses who practice in all areas of healthcare delivery hold responsibility for engaging ineffective communication. One place that needs skillful and critical communication is in the practice of mental health. For effective health outcomes, there is a need for distinct communication tailored to meets the needs of specific mental health cases with an overall goal of promoting health outcomes. According to the Royal Colleague of Nursing, nurses and nursing staff constitute the heart of the communication process with fundamental roles including assessment, recording, and reporting on aspects of care covering treatment, handling information with sensitivity and confidentiality, and dealing with complaints
Clients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) should a uniquely tailored communication approach. Many nurses and people who offer support to PTSD clients find it challenging to communicate effectively. More often, the PTSD clients are afraid to address what happened to them, and families may always find uncomfortable to share how the lives of people living with PTSD are impacting them. In most instances, a family member may try to evade talking about PTSD issues, and lack of such communication aggravates the situations. It is vital to assess partners' mental health when treating survivors of high levels of trauma in post-conflict settings. A mental health nurse would need to take into consideration these challenges that impede proper communication. This paper features communication interaction between mental health nurse and PTSD clients in terms of fundamental communication skills, meaningful conversation, written communication, legal and professional dimension challenges or barriers, and integrating families into overall care.
Healthcare providers managing PTSD patients are license practitioners. Thus, their practice in delivering healthcare is guided by law. In all aspects of healthcare delivery, their communication approach is guided by critical tents of professionalism, legal regulations, and ethics. The mental health nurse practitioners must ensure that he or she offers the highest level of services delivery guided by professional ethics and laws, which applies to issues like confidentiality of information from the patients. Communication is also essential when obtaining consent. Healthcare professionals, including nurses, are obligated to inform patients of the risks and benefits of a treatment or procedure before deciding whether they would like to give or refuse consent (NMC 2015).
Trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are among the prevalent mental health disorders. According to Silove et al. (2017), people living with survivors of higher levels of trauma depicted an elevated symptom of grief and explosive anger. PTSD arises due to events that cause moderate to severe stress reactions that may be expressed as a sense of horror, helplessness, serious injury, or threat of severe injury or death. The usual precipitating events include combat, natural or human-made disasters, sexual abuse, unexpected death of a loved one, terrorist attacks, serious accidents or illnesses, physical assault, and other forms. People living with PTSD experience disturbing thoughts and feelings associated with a traumatic event long after it occurs. PTSD comes with a range of symptoms that can be categorized into cognitive, emotional, physical, and behavioural.
Cognitive manifestations include confusion and insufficient attention. Emotional entails shock and depression, and the physical is marked by nausea and insomnia, while behavioural is manifested via irritability and suspicion. PTSD may often manifest persistent or exaggerated negative thoughts, including fear, horror, anger, guilt, or shame. These symptoms may be accompanied by a diminished interest in activities, feelings of detachment, inability to experience positive emotions, are also common symptoms, hypervigilance, impaired memory, and other self-destructive patterns of behaviors.
Management of PTSD requires multifaceted and team approach interventions involving a trained team of health professionals. The primary approaches detailing PTSD management interventions include cognitive therapy, exposure therapy, psychopharmacotherapy, eye movement desensitization, and reprocessing (EMDR). Cognitive therapy helps patients recognize and modify harmful thinking patterns, such as fears that traumatic events will recur. Exposure therapy is a desensitization intervention used to help PTSD patients minimize flashbacks and nightmares, thereby allowing them to face frightening situations safely. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy entails a series of guided eye movements that permit PTSD patients to process traumatic memories and manage their reactions.
Psychopharmacology entails the management of PTSD symptoms using medication such as antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. Approaches to managing PTSD vary from one patient to another, and determining the optimal intervention strategy for a specific patient requires careful assessment. Health providers, including mental health nurse practitioner, needs core nursing competencies. Thus, mental health nurses should have the capacity to provide mental health diagnostic evaluations, treatment planning, psychopharmacotherapy, and other forms of therapies. In PTSD management stages, a mental health nurse needs to cultivate advanced communication skills necessary for PTSD interventions and other advanced mental health treatment.
Communication with people experiencing a mental health crisis can be challenging. Practitioners may feel that they communicate clearly, but the person may be too distressed to take in and remember information (Nice.org.uk). Thus, communication between patients and healthcare providers should be anchored on specific principles that ensure efficiency and promote optimal outcomes. Communication is one of the crucial skills in all spheres of life. Lack of adequate listening skills constitutes a core barrier and challenge to communication (Bach & Grant, 2015). This skill is not only about speaking and writing but also about listening. Listening requires focus and concentration. It is more than the physical process of hearing because it entails more of an attitude, intellectual, and emotional process. Active listening is the highest and most effective listening level, marked by focus, great attention, not interrupting, and expression of interest in what the speaker is saying (Bach & Grant, 2015). Listening skills are essential to nursing practice. Active listening will allow a mental health nurse to collect vital ...