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Who You’ll Hear
Kati Kleber, MSN RN – Nurse educator, former cardiac med-surg/stepdown and neurocritical care nurse, author, and speaker.
What You’ll Learn
- Predictability
- Educate
- Confidance
- Trust
Communication Tips – Patients and Their Support Systems Show Notes
- Predictability is SO important to decreasing anxiety
- Someone new constantly coming in, with lord knows what vs. having a general understanding of when people will be by and what they’ll need so they can anticipate this
- As much as I HATE whiteboards, this do really help with this
- Start off right – educate about plan
- Never assume family member roles – ask, “So who is this you’ve got with you today?” or if the patient is nonverbal, “So can you tell me your relation to ____?”
- Be confident – they want to feel safe with you
- Ask for privacy when you need it in a business like tone
- “We’re going to get ______ all bathed and cleaned up for the day. It would be a great time to take a break and grab some coffee or something from the cafeteria!”
- Build trust early
- Follow through on something small
- Provide predictability
- Create a team mentality and dissipate the us vs. them thought tendency
- This will decrease anxiety, and turn it from constant conflict to collaboration
- Lean into any misunderstandings or when someone appears angry with curiosity, not avoidance.
- “You seem frustrated. Can you tell me what’s up?”
- Most people really just want someone to hear them, their concerns, etc. even if there is nothing you can do about it
- Validate their experience
- Sometimes you’ll have patients who went through something traumatic right before getting to the hospital (like their loved one having a cardiac arrest)
- It’s helpful to hold space for this if they share it with you
- You may also have patients or loved ones that had a close call and ask what to do in a cardiac emergency at home. This is a great comprehensive article of what to do in various emergencies, and features yours truly when discussing cardiac arrest specifically!
I cannot even begin to tell you how grateful I am to have come across all of these podcasts. Even as nurse of 12 years on a tele floor, I have found all of this information so helpful and have discovered many ways to change and improve the way I go about doing things when caring got and communicating with my patients and their families. I am starting a new job in the ICU at a news hospital next week so I have been working on the Breakthrough ICU course which has helped alleviate a lot of my anxiety about my first day and what to expect as I have never even floated to ICU. I love that it is written in a way that’s easy to understand, from one nurse to another, and gives very practical tips to what actually goes on, which is very different from what we learn in nursing school. So helpful!! Thank you! I will continue to listen to your podcasts and look forward to the cardiac and Neuro courses as well!