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 se...