Important Skills Needed by Nurses during Patient Interviews

Self-reflection
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Introduction
Over the past centuries, the medical field has essentially focused on providing services that would result in treatment or healing. It narrowed down the scope of medicine and medical practitioners to the very basic. It also made them look like robots since they were just supposed to do what they were tasked with without being in a position to do any other thing. They had no flexibility in their professions, and if there was any, they had no skills to conform to the same. Things, however, changed for the new age. In the 21st century, the expectation from healthcare professionals is more than mastering medical facts. Healthcare professionals must develop interpersonal communication skills because they lead to increased productivity, patient care improvement, and less litigation. Nurses are at the forefront of advancing interpersonal communication skills because patients' initial contact with healthcare professionals starts with a nurse. Nurses who are competent communicators establish trust with patients during interactions and elicit collaborative responses to treatment schemes. This paper reflects on the practice of active listening skills, concise non-verbal communication skills, and intercultural awareness skills during patient interviews.
Active listening skills
In the recent day, it is important to have a medical practitioner listen and even relate to the patient and other people who are not patients. It helps establish a relationship between the two parties and creates a healing environment for the patients. In real life, the primary objective of interviewing a patient is to obtain all the necessary details required to make an informed diagnosis (Jahromi et al., 2016). Similarly, the goal of interviewing a character during role play is to gather all essential details that define his/her health condition.
I achieved this through critical listening, which is essentially the ability to listen closely, show interest in what is being said, and refrain from interrupting. In nursing, active listening is crucial because most patients do not understand symptom diagnosis and medical terminologies. Through active listening, I decipher the symptomatic clues that the other character was attempting to communicate and verbally paraphrase them. I also learned that active listening as a skill involves many things, such as avoiding patient judgment or anything that the patient says. Patients are usually quite sensitive, especially those with either chronic or sensitive ailments, and w...